Everyone knows that the art of political rhetoric has declined drastically in the modern world. Observers of the decline often measure and deplore it, but few pause to reflect that one of the reasons for the decline may be the acceptance of certain liberal principles which entail limits to the scope and power of political speech. Even such a clear-sighted observer of the interplay of language and politics as George Orwell argued that the simplification and purification of language went hand in hand with the liberalization of politics. Orwell was not mistaken when he coupled perverted speech with totalitarian politics. But it is dangerous to assume that excellent political speech is at home in liberal regimes, or that liberal speech can be as psychologically satisfactory as illiberal speech. Orwell recognized this point when he noticed in his review of Hitler's Mein Kampf that the liberal “hedonistic attitude to life” fails to satisfy some of the irrepressible longings of the human soul, and leaves room for the kind of appeal made by Hitler. There is an inherent weakness in liberal rhetoric which cuts it off from some of the sources of political conviction and community.

American wartime policy regarding Russia continues to be disputed heatedly. In these controversies the genesis of Soviet-American relations in World War II, although it obviously played a key role in shaping both the victorious anti-Axis alliance and the uneasy peace that followed, has so far been neglected. To throw light on the initial rapprochement, this paper is presented as a survey of the half-year period in 1941 between the German attack on Russia and the Japanese attack on the United States.

Sumner Welles, Under Secretary of State in 1941, records that “the relations between the United States and the Soviet Union, particularly during the period of the German-Soviet agreement, had been practically non-existent.” The Soviet invasion of Finland, sharply resented by American public opinion, served to exacerbate relations further. Only after the German attack of June 22, 1941, did the two great powers draw together.

Hobbes's preference for monarchical sovereign forms and his critique of democratic political organization are well known. In this article I suggest, however, that his opposition to democratic life constitutes the central frame through which we must understand some of the most important theoretical mutations that occur throughout the various stages of his civil science. Key alterations in the Hobbesian political theory from The Elements of Law to Leviathan can be interpreted as efforts to retroactively foreclose the emergence of a substantive democratic normativity that the prior theoretical framework allowed for or suggested. Hobbes's opposition to democracy is ultimately so significant so as to fundamentally structure various key elements of his political philosophy.

One of the striking facts about the present religious situation in the United States is the notable growth of religious bodies and the marked increase in religious affiliation on the part of the American people. In 1900, 36 per cent of the American people were reported as religiously affiliated; by 1930, the figure had risen to 47 per cent; and by 1950, to 57 per cent. In the quarter of a century from 1926 to 1950, the population of the United States rose 28.6 per cent; church membership, however, jumped nearly 60 per cent. The annual gain in church membership since 1940 has been some two per cent, the most rapid in all our history. Allowing for the notorious imprecision of statistics on religion, it may still be asserted with considerable confidence that there is today among the American people a greater tendency than ever before to regard themselves as affirmatively religious and to identify themselves with religious institutions. The actual religious significance of this tendency is not easy to assess; certainly it would be rash to infer from the statistics any conclusions as to the actual faith of the masses of the American people. There are too many cultural and sociological factors involved, and “religion” means too many different things to different people, to make any such inference at all possible. But I do not think it can be denied that there is today a growing tendency towards religious identification among Americans. Even those Americans who avow no particular church affiiliation would, in the great majority, regard themselves as “religious” in some sense. Again, merely as a cultural fact, it may be asserted that Supreme Court Justice Douglas' recent dictum (speaking forthe court in the New York released time case, 1952), “We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being,” just about describes the view the American people, by and large, take of themselves.

In 1860 French liberal Charles de Rémusat noticed that pessimism had made rapid progress during the preceding ten years and that his period, which was once reputed to be proud of its accomplishments, then counted more censors than admirers. A similar observation had been made in 1852 by the distinguished Catholic historian of democratic convictions, Frédéric Ozanam, who stated that the best minds believed in decadence and that the idea of progress had become a discredited notion.

Bernard Shaw's still lingering statement, “a Catholic university is a contradiction in terms,” is a tautology or a prejudice. A tautology if we read it literally to mean: “A universal university is a contradiction in terms.” A prejudice if we supply the historical depth and turn it into a more precise statement, to wit: “A university under such authoritarian strictures by the Church as was the university of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries contradicts the notion of free inquiry which our century identifies with the university.”

This essay offers an alternative to influential interpretations of elites, peoples, and senates in Niccolò Machiavelli's theory of mixed republics. It analyzes in greater depth both Machiavelli's ascription of the morally objectionable and politically dangerous trait of insolenzia to the nobles as a social class; and his justifications for the establishment of senates as institutions that partially remedy the problem of aristocratic insolence—justifications that depart from traditional Ciceronian and Polybian standards. Machiavelli demonstrates in The Prince, the Discourses, and the Florentine Histories that republics with senates, such as ancient Rome, manage to mollify aristocratic insolence, while those lacking them, like modern Florence, permit such insolence to proliferate unchecked. Moreover, Machiavelli intimates, republics that collectively gather nobles within senate chambers are afforded the opportunity to entirely eliminate aristocratic insolence. The essay concludes with an analysis of senatorial institutions in Machiavelli's “Discursus on Florentine Matters.”

Few parts of Bismarck's Thoughts and Recollections have won greater fame than those containing the description of the last meeting between the chancellor and the dying Emperor William I, then nearly 91 years old.

The one question on which our American humanists have never come to anything like agreement is the religious question. They have some common understanding on the nature of will and of the higher will, and on the subordinate relationship of intellect to will, on the need of discipline, and on the inevitability of degrees in society. But they remain of several minds on religion. More went what is called Anglican though he stayed in this country; T. S. Eliot went Anglican and also anglophile, at least till more recent times. No one knows just what Babbitt religiously was; some have said liberal Protestant, some have said his higher will is divine and sometimes his own words allow this interpretation, and some have said he is remote first and last from Christianity but is an oriental saint.

The signing in Helsinki of the agreement on security and cooperation in Europe has led to bitter criticism of President Ford and of the policy under which the United States drifted into recognizing Soviet acquisition of 114,000 square miles of Finnish, Polish, German, Czechoslovak, and Romanian territory, apparently sanctified as well Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and recognized the “permanent” division of Europe. In return for endorsing these Soviet conquests, the Western states received some vague promises that the Soviet Union and the East European states would take a “positive and humanitarian attitude” towards applications from their citizens to rejoin their families in the West, would “facilitate the improvement of the dissemination” of publications from other countries, would provide three weeks' notice of large military maneuvers within 156 miles of frontiers, and assured that every European state would be free from “external influence.” All these phrases seem small recompense for such great concessions and from two years of negotiation by 492 diplomats, especially when hope in Western Europe in particular had been high for an end to jamming, censorship, and control over travel. Critics noted in particular that the formal summit agreement awarded the Soviet Union prizes it had sought since 1954, while the parallel discussion of reducing military forces in Eastern and Western Europe, in which the Soviet Union and its associates maintain immense superiorities, has long been stalled. Indeed, now that the West no longer has the lever of the Geneva talks, it has little pressure to persuade the Soviet Union to discuss mutual balanced force reductions. Many now fear that the Soviet Union will press instead for a collective security agreement, which would have no meaning, but which would totally demolish NATO, while leaving the Soviets on the commanding military heights in Eastern Europe.

Proudhon once remarked—and Cortéz eagerly took up the idea—that in the Western world all great intellectual and moral issues derive, fundamentally, from theological sources. In the past, and even today, Western thought has received and is receiving a tremendous impetus from the secularization of religious and theological doctrines. The Christian doctrines of salvation, of the kingdom of God, of the visio beatifica in a Paradise of happiness and perfect concord, have always led men not only to envision but even to plan an earthly millenium. With the rise of anthropocentric humanism the theological bases of these conceptions were swept away. Man and his powers superseded them. Man, endowed with reason, freedom and a desire for happiness, was made the focal point of history and of nature.

Ideologically, this war could be termed “post-war war.” When it began, political thought was still concerned with the problems which we inherited from the other catastrophe. After the beginning of hostilities the political intellectuals began to busy themselves almost exclusively with the problems of the coming peace, alas, so far away. According to the peace-planners nothing is more important than the formation of post-war blue-prints. Some people even go so far as to assert that the very outcome of this struggle depends largely upon the proclamation of attractive peace aims (or war aims). That side is going to win, it is held, which offers the most seductive plan for a brave new world, formulated so as to be comprehensible to the simplest minds. The most curious part of all this is that nobody has been able hitherto to formulate the ideal war aims. Those war aims which have been proclaimed so far could not even arouse the enthusiasm of their own sponsors. They all taste like brackish water and all of them can be traced back at least to the time of the Enlightenment. The most rabid among the peace-planners now begin to realize that those aims or slogans, which up to a short time ago still made an impression upon the masses, have lost their appeal. This is a difficulty which Mr. Laski wants to overcome by finding “another word”. Without denying that the fertile minds of people like Laski certainly can find other words, it can be doubted whether they will be able to find a more convincing formula than Johann Nestroy's: “It is much better to be wealthy and happy than to be poor and sick”.

Following military collapse both in 1918 and in 1945 Germany presented two economic phenomena indicative of the destruction of economic life. In the twenties an open inflation occurred. For a relatively short time German money lost its value and purchasing power. This period of a completely open inflation was limited by a currency reform of a particular kind. Instead of cancelling the money in circulation the volume of money was increased by introducing a new stable money, the so-called Rentenmark. At the same time, the old money in circulation had been devaluated at the rate of one billionth of its face value. This controlled monetary experiment as well as the preceding huge inflation have found a place in the history of money. On account of the undoubted success of the devaluation experiment in 1923, the opinion seems to prevail that a devaluation is the best, if not the only way to reform the currency.

The cold war—now aggravated by shooting war in Korea, —is being waged on many fronts. One of these fronts is ideological, reflecting the incompatibility of the social ideals of the opponents. The ideological war is being conducted in many ways; and among the weapons used by the foe there is perhaps none more irritating to the Americans than the assertion that the Soviets enjoy real democracy while American democracy is but a ridiculous fake.

From the very first day of their rule over Russia the Soviet leaders have insisted that their democracy is the best, or the highest ever achieved in history. This insistence they have made both before and after the enactment of the Stalin Constitution (1936)—in other words, both when their democracy excluded from the exercise of political rights the members of the former “bourgeoisie” and its servants (for example, clergymen and Tsarist policemen), and after their shift to universal suffrage.