The essay discusses the interpretation of Aristotle's natural right teaching by Leo Strauss. This interpretation ought to be seen as the result of an investigation into the history of philosophy and of an attempt to philosophically address political problems. By virtue of this twofold origin, the Straussian commentary is unorthodox: it deviates from traditional Aristotelianism (Aquinas and Averroes) and it seems alien to the text of the Nicomachean Ethics. Strauss's criticism of medieval variants results from their incapacity—shared by contemporary political thought—to address a perplexing issue: political exception. He sees in Aristotle's political teaching a way to escape from this failure: the unification, in natural right, of the requirements of statesmanship and ethics. The discovery of this way allowed Strauss to produce an interpretation of natural right that articulates important points pertaining to Aristotelian political science.

The strangely unreal debate on the feasibility of United Nations intervention in Rhodesia or South Africa (to overthrow “colonialist” regimes) or in Vietnam (to stop or deescalate a war) would benefit from a more serious examination of the largest and most daring U.N. experiment on record. The Congo peacekeeping operation was unique, controversial and costly. The growing body of empirical data about this four-year operation provides a solid basis for understanding the severe limits of the United Nations as an instrument for political reform and crisis management in the Third World, to say nothing of the more difficult tasks of state-building and nation-building.

Ironically shortly before and after Lincoln proclaimed emancipation, the Great Emancipator received as much criticism as praise for what he did or did not do. This article examines how the 1861 award-winning L'Abolition de l'esclavage by Augustin Cochin helped persuade Americans and his fellow Frenchmen that the abolition of slavery was both morally and practically right. Cochin, the empirical moralist, had a deeper appreciation of Lincoln than many of the President's critics—on both sides of the Atlantic. The article also offers new material and insights on the relationship between French and American liberal thinkers during the Civil War.

The excessive entanglement standard is part of the Supreme Court's three-pronged test for determining the constitutional validity of government aid to religion. This article challenges in turn the validity of that standard and its two components, namely the criteria of administrative entanglement and political divisiveness. The administrative entanglement criterion is flawed because it violates the principle of equality. The political divisiveness standard, on the other hand, not only misreads the intention of the Founding Fathers but also ignores the value of religious conflict in a democracy and the strategy for handling such conflict proposed by James Madison.

The problem of pluralism in political life causes contemporary man much anguish. Many and varied, difficult and challenging are the peculiar problems posed by the hitherto unrivalled heterogeneity within present-day political life. These problems have to be lived daily by every man at the level of prudence. And they must be continually examined and sifted by social scientists and philosophers. The social scientist must pursue them with his empiriological or phenomena-minded analysis, that is, ananalysis that is primarily concerned with the controlled observation of the facts, and with the formulation of hypothetical generalizations based on presumed facts; the philosopher must pursue them with his ontological or being-minded analysis, that is, an analysis that is primarily concerned with the fundamental principles that must guide the resolution of the problems. Among contemporary philosophers who have grappled with these problems, Jacques Maritain, the distinguished Thomist philosopher, is surely one of the most discerning and illuminating. I wish to consider in this essay some of the main tenets in Maritain's positio vis-á-vis the problem of pluralism in political life, with particular attention to his views on the problem posed by religious pluralism.

Jogging along the road to a dinner party one evening, Balfour's sister said she thought that the coachman had taken a wrong turn. “Well, that is his business,” remarked the politician laconically, “not ours.” The lady was quite in order to speculate about the matter, but interference was forbidden. Likewise, academic philosophers and sociologists have a perfect right to speculate about politics, but they must not, as academics, interfere with the political process; that is the job of the practical politician. Balfour himself theorized about politics and about the nature of human society, and also took a hand in directing the course of political events; but he saw the two as quite distinct activities. “Knowledge,” he maintained, is seldom power. And a sociologist so coldly independent of the social forces among which he lived as thoroughly to understand them, would, in all probability, be as impotent to guide the evolution of a community as an astonomer to modify the orbit of a comet.

Appraisals of the pontificate of Pope Pius XII have pictured him as a democratic-minded person who did his best to modernize a tradition-bound, authoritarian-minded institution with not completely satisfactory results. In the words of one author, “Pacelli, a modern man set down in a dank maze of dusty dogma, musty custom, dark superstition, and moss-grown standpattism, may very well have done all that one man can do to let in light and air.” Comments of this type are, obviously, mixed compliments, the laudatory references to the late pope and his personal achievements being counterbalanced by less favorable epithets for the Church. It is not the purpose of this article to consider the alleged stand-pattism, dustiness, mustiness, or totalitarian-mindedness of the Church. Its object is to present a study of some of the political teaching of Pius XII, and to inquire whether any of his doctrines are of a modernizing nature and to what extent they “let in light and air.”

Through a comparison of Leo Strauss's and Raymond Aron's interpretations of Thucydides's history, this paper sheds light on the relationship between political history and political philosophy. In continuing the dialogue between the two thinkers, I demonstrate that in spite of their opposed views on modern historical consciousness, they converge in a defense of the object and method of classical political history. However, there is a deeper disagreement regarding the relationship between philosophy and politics. While Strauss makes the case for the compatibility of classical political history and classical political philosophy on the grounds that Thucydides is a “philosophic historian,” Aron argues that it is precisely because Thucydides is not a philosopher that he succeeds in understanding an essential feature of political things, namely, contingency in history.

In an era of profound social change, when all aspects of national and international life are under scrutiny and review, it is vital that successes and failures in international scientific and educational relations be examined. The most dramatic success story in recent times may be the cooperative programs in agriculture that have led to the “green revolution.” The history of this remarkable effort can be measured against the criteria of the development of cooperative solutions to urgent “human species problems” and of building indigenous capacity through the training of leaders. If it is true that the core of international cultural relations is the purposeful exchange of knowledge and skills, especially knowledge and skills that can be used toward solving problems affecting the entire world, agricultural program can also be measured against this standard.

The philosophy of the Enlightenment and the rise of capitalistic industrialism ushered in the age of the masses. The one represents a social philosophy which undermined the traditional relations between state and society, and in addition, the well-established forms of precapitalistic society; the other brought in the machine and large-scale enterprises both leading to the formation of masses in our modern society. A sort of a natural process seemed to be in operation here; suddenly, called forth by nobody and wanted by nobody, the masses appeared. They grew with breath-taking rapidity. No sooner did they make their appearance than the first danger signals were hoisted. Primarily they came from representatives of the declining order, protagonists of the ancient regime such as, to mention a few, de Maistre, Donoso Cortes, Alexis de Tocqueville. Adam Mueller and Gentz among the romanticists sounded the same warnings. Somewhat later they were joined by such diverse representatives of bourgeois humanism as Wilhelm Bensen, J. Burckhardt, Spengler, and Sombart. The new, masses are visualized here as the forces undermining all cultural and religious institutions and values. At last even the very beneficiaries themselves of the new order became concerned about the social consequences of the machine-age. Thomas R. Malthus and John Stuart Mill expressed this concern very strongly; however, they saw in the masses not so much a necessary concomitant of an individualisticmachine- age and of materialistic progress as the effect of an irrational behavior of the “poor” with regard to marriage and child-bearing.

THE WARS with which we are concerned in the present study are those which had their beginning with the American wars of Independence and in Europe with those of the French Revolution, after-wars followed by the Napoleonic campaigns. From that time up to the present—a period of more than a century and a half—all the wars waged by states and peoples called civilized, though differing from one another by reason of military technic, by reason of political and moral motives, by reason of extent and importance, have had certain characteristics in common, which from the sociological point of view enable us to group them together. For that reason, we call them all modern wars.