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.

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.

This is an attempt to map out the wide variety of party-dominated democratic systems in the light of concern about the seeming decline of party government in the face of contemporary challenges. The object is to determine the parameters of their institutional, mobilization, and policymaking patterns that may constitute a reasonable definition of party government. With the help of qualitative attribute tables, sixteen systems are compared, including some non-European and some marginal cases. The most important variables indicating a high degree of conformity to the model, not surprisingly, turn out to be an executive-dominated parliamentary system, a bipolar, Left-Right-based party system, a degree of centralization, and considerable problem-solving capacity, even if the parties play only a limited role in policymaking.

The major war criminals Goering, Hess, von Ribbentrop, and others were sentenced by an international military tribunal in Nuremberg for certain crimes or groups of crimes which had been formulated prior to the trial in a charter signed in August, 1945, by the representatives of the United States, France, Britain, and Russia. In the Charter of the International Military Tribunal adopted in London three major categories of delinquency had been set up dealing with crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Crimes against peace were to consist of acts such as planning, preparing, initiating or waging a war of aggression in violation of international treaties or participating in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of the foregoing. War crimes were to consist of violations of the laws or customs of war and were to include, among others, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave labor, ill-treatment of prisoners of war, killing of hostages, and wanton destruction of cities not justified by military necessity. As crimes against humanity were to be considered such acts as exterminations, enslavement, deportation of any civilian population before or during the war or any kind of persecution if the latter had occurred in execution of or in connection with any other crime under the jurisdiction of the tribunal.

A discussion of the “art of politics” requires no justification at a time when the potentials of publicity and propaganda have made it abundantly clear that successful government is not identical with application of the results of a Gallup poll. It is for this very reason that we have also become distrustful of the ars politica which has been more and more identified with the modern arts of persuasion. Although the engineers of political publicity assure us that with the right technique the ruler can get anything “across,” we turn rather to those who assert that good government is not an art but an active prudence, directed by such steady instruments of control as popular representation. However, even the most perfect technology of government is not a substitute for the art of governing. Guizot, no friend of absolutism, has pointed out one of the most astonishing manifestations of this “art”: the ability of the ancien régime to maintain between people and ruler an intimate understanding without parliaments in the modern sense.

This article inquires into the moral successes and failings of the superrich in America. To do this, we turn to Alexis de Tocqueville who outlines a set of expectations for any privileged elite. Drawing from his Old Regime, Memoir on Pauperism, and Democracy in America, we argue that the superrich are obliged to a particular kind of charity, which we specify as philanthropy. To fulfill their philanthropic duties, the superrich must steadfastly attend to three obligations: maintaining their local communities, safeguarding local liberties, and providing moral leadership. In the conclusion, we suggest how the superrich might be disciplined unto this virtue.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau introduces three conceptions of the general will: an implicit will of collectives, a declared will of assemblies, and a personal will toward the common good. Where his Discourse on Political Economy uses only the first conception, the Social Contract and its unpublished “Geneva Manuscript” turn to the second and third. I argue that Rousseau's mature account in the Social Contract grounds legitimacy on the capacity of citizens to declare their common good through deliberation and the exercise of private discernment. This finding helps resolve a long-standing interpretive impasse between “formal” and “transcendent” accounts of the general will and illumines the role of democratic sovereignty in the Social Contract.

Let us think of the human being, not in an abstract and general way, but in the most concrete possible, the most personal fashion. Let us think of this certain old man we have known for years in the country, —this old farmer with his wrinkled face, his keen eyes which have beheld so many harvests and so many earthly horizons, his long habits of patience and suffering, courage, poverty and noble labor, a man perhaps like those parents of a great living American statesman whose photographs appeared some months ago in a particularly moving copy of a weekly magazine. Or let us think of this certain boy or this girl who are our relatives or our friends, whose everyday life we well know, and whose loved appearance, whose soft or husky voice is enough to rejoice our hearts. Let us remember—remember in our heart—a single gesture of the hand, or the smile in the eyes of one we love. What treasures on earth, what masterpieces of art or of science, could pay for the treasures of life, feeling, freedom and memory, of which this gesture, this smile is the fugitive expression? We perceive intuitively, in an indescribable not inescapable flash, that nothing in the world is more precious than one single human being. I am well aware how many difficult questions come to mind at the same time and I shall come back to these difficulties, but for the present I wish only to keep in mind this simple and decisive intuition, by means of which the incomparable value of the human person is revealed to us. Moreover, St. Thomas Aquinas warns us that the Person is what is noblest and most perfect in the whole of nature.

The most common assumption made about John Locke's historical sense is that he had none. In his lifetime, Locke was many things: a doctor, a philosopher, a political theorist, a policymaker and a biblical scholar. But few, if any, would say that Locke was a historian as well. Unlike Hobbes before him and Hume after him, Locke would write no history of England or of English politics. My intention in this paper then is not to make the claim that he was a “historian” in the strict sense of the word. I would therefore agree with John Pocock when he writes that Locke was the only major political writer of his age who did not try “to understand English politics through the history of English law (and English political institutions).”

This paper separates Wollstonecraft's critical concept of “machiavelian” power and the capacity for domination, from a neutral concept of politics as the complex processes surrounding the power to govern, from her normative account of popular sovereignty which emphasizes collective political power to ensure the discharge of natural duty by way of civil and political rights and duties. Wollstonecraft's voice as political judge—which is audible throughout her work, but particularly clearly in her book on the French Revolution—articulates the ways that political power can be abused and misused, and can also be effective. Her theory is political in several ways: she interrogates the nature of political power and its explanatory importance; she consistently articulates political judgment about matters both conventionally political and social; she offers a theoretical justification for the expansion of the scope of politics to cover relations that hitherto were thought to be outside its domain; and finally her work itself constitutes a political intervention.

Over the years, historians have engaged in various disputes concerning the origins, nature, and results of the progressive movement that dominated the political imagination of Americans during the first two decades of the twentieth century. No one set of categories has dominated those disputes, but much of the controversy has focused on a fundamental tension in progressive thought: the conflict between a liberalism centered in humanitarian and moral passion and one based in an ethos of scientific analysis.