Romeo and Juliet is often the first play by Shakespeare that students and playgoers encounter. For many it remains the paradigmatic depiction of pure and passionate love, ruined by a meaningless feud and unsympathetic opponents. Scholarly interpretations often encourage this view. This article shows that the play is more complicated—and more interesting. Although the lovers and their passion are noble and beautiful, or precisely because they are pitched at so high a level, they cannot endure and mature as viable adults in a healthy community. Verona itself is characterized as stunted: in its civic arrangements, relations among and within families, incentives for adolescents to grow up, and in the inadequate guidance of spiritual institutions. The article explores the relation between the private passion of young love and the political circumstances which nourish or destroy it. It aims to deepen the responses of audiences that love the play, its memorable lovers, and love itself.

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.

“I Must take recourse to fiction and put together a figure made up of many things like the fabulous unions of goats and stags which are found in pictures." So speaks the philosopher in Plato's Republic when he faces the enigmatic nature of the common man or the people. Then he proceeds to evoke two images.

An Account of Newman's political thought must explain a paradox. Newman declared that the principal aim of his life was to combat religious liberalism; and however novel may have been his approach to many problems, no charge against the orthodoxy of his theological writings has ever been sustained. Yet Newman was considered dangerously liberal by many. A few years after Newman had been made a Cardinal, Lord Selborne, during an audience with Pope Leo XIII, chanced to mention the name of Newman. The Pope's face brightened. “It was not easy; no, it was not easy. They said he was too liberal; but I was determined to honour the Church by honouring Newman. I have always felt a deep veneration for him. I am proud that it has been given me to honour such a man.” In what sense could it be said of Newman that he was too liberal? A study of his political thinking will, I think, take one far toward an answer to the question.

JohnMarshall was modest when he said in Cohens v. Virginia that The Federalist was “a complete commentary” on the American Constitution. His own ventures in constitutional exegesis—highlighted by his interpretations of the commerce and contract clauses and his liberal construction of the implied powers clause—secure his rank as a constitutional commentator and seriously rival the authors of The Federalist. Marshall was, however, operating at a distinct advantage over the influential Hamilton, Madison and Jay, who wrote commentaries on a constitution which was yet to be rendered workable; they composed pamphlets intended to secure acceptance of the proposed government by reluctant states. Such commentaries are bound to have more limited value than decisions meant to accomodate the constitutional instrument to the practical problems of government. Marshall's essential contribution lay in the fact that his expositions of the Constitution, as distinguished from the pamphleteering attempts of The Federalist, imparted momentum to those trends which were eventually responsible for the adjustment of our political institutions to the changing tempo of an industrial technology.

In this essay I set forth the musical philosophy of Bertrand de Jouvenel, a topic that has not been previously explored. I focus on Jouvenel's literary background; his emphasis on the imagination; his insistence that metaphor is the basis of all thought; and his critique of the “amousia” of modern philosophy, that is, its lack of music. Jouvenel believes that this amousia has led to dangerous political consequences in the twentieth century, such as the aesthetic and psychological promotion of violence. After setting forth Jouvenel's account, I explore these consequences.

The history of the Catholic Church includes men who, after brilliant services to the Church, died outside her fold. Best known among them is Tertullian, the apologetic writer of the Early Church; less known is Ochino, the third vicar-general of the Capuchins, whose flight to Calvin's Geneva almost destroyed his order. In the nineteenth century there were two famous representatives of this group. Johann von Doellinger refused, when more than seventy years old, to accept the decision of the Vatican Council about papal infallibility. He passed away in 1890 unreconciled, though he had been distinguished for years as the outstanding German Catholic theologian. Félicité de la Mennais was celebrated as the new Pascal and Bossuet of his time before he became the modern Tertullian by breaking with the Church because Pope Gregory XVI rejected his views on the relations between the Church and die world. As he lay deathly ill, his niece, “Madame de Kertanguy asked him: ‘Féli, do you want a priest? Surely, you want a priest?’ Lamennais answered: ‘No.’ The niece repeated: ‘I beg of you.’ But he said with a stronger voice: ‘No, no, no.

The intellectual life is neither committed to Christianity nor does it antecedently reject it.* That it is not committed to Christianity is clear enough from history. Plato, Aristotle, Archimedes, Moses Maimonides, Ibn Sina and Einstein were not Christians but no one would deny that they were scholars. That the Christian can be a scholar is just as plain. Abelard, Aquinas, Copernicus, Galileo, Erasmus, Newton and Newman were Christians and no one would deny that they were creative intellectuals.

The topic of friendship is enjoying a renewed interest among political theorists and philosophers. The three books reviewed here join several other recent works on friendship and the creation of a journal of friendship studies, Amity. Despite their shared focus on friendship, the three works under review complement rather than duplicate one another. Alexander Nehamas's work is designed for a general readership, with scholarly nuance being largely relegated to the notes. The books by P. E. Digeser and Ann Ward are more typical academic publications. While Ward focuses almost exclusively on Aristotle, Nehamas and Digeser treat him as the touchstone for all later discussions of friendship in the Western tradition.

The essence of the “new look” in the national security policy of the United States has been expressed by Administration spokesmen, Democratic critics, and analysts in key phrases which have heaped confusion upon ambiguity. The “new look” has been characterized as a policy of “instant retaliation,” of “massive retaliation,” of relying on the ability to “retaliate with great force by mobile means.” It has been described as a “strategy of detachment,” as an attempt to “hedge our strategic bets,” as preparing for the “long pull,” as “a reassessment of our strategic and logistic capabilities,” as preparing to take “whatever steps our national interest requires,” and as “an attempt by intelligent people to keep abreast of the times.” It has been called “less a policy than an idea,” “a misnomer,” “no ‘new look’ at all,” “merely an acceptance of the Old Look,” “a bluff to a certain extent,” a “gradual shift in emphasis,” and “revolutionary.” The “new look” has been distinguished from the “interim look,” but there has been some doubt as to whether the “interim look” referred to fiscal 1954 or fiscal 1955 or both. The term became so contagiously popular that even the alleged clean-up of the “security risks” in the Department of State was supposed to have brought about a “new look” there.

National Bolshevism represents a chapter in German-Russian relations since the First World War. As a policy advocating an Eastern orientation for Germany it is a most puzzling and at this day a very acute phenomenon. To those educated to observe the spectrum of political opinions in terms of Right and Left, with the extreme Right at the opposite end from the extreme Left, National Bolshevism seems a paradox. It suggests the meeting of extremes. More concretely the term stands for a rapprochement between German nationalism and Russian Communism. The story of National Bolshevism is the story of two “strange bedfellows.”

In the effort to comprehend this upsetting pattern it might be recalled that modern psychology has in many ways succeeded in breaking down our traditional thinking about human relations. Love, for example, has lost its meaning apart from hate, which has become its alter ego. We might be tempted to translate this finding into political terms, and National Bolshevism would appear as an example of a political love-hate relationship. It might also be suggested that the further we get from the origins and die more insight we gain into die workings of die two twentieth century extremes — Fascism and Communism — the more we are struck by dieir affinities. We grant diat Fascism is nodiing more dian “doctrineless dynamism,” whereas Communism goes back to die solid doctrinaire structure of Marxism. And even through European history since 1917 often threatened to lead up to an ultimate conflict between Fascism and Communism, die “transmutation” through which Marxism has gone in modern Russia has brought it ironically close to Fascism. It has become increasingly evident that die fight between die two was a mere sham battle.

These two lectures by Leo Strauss, “What Can We Learn from Political Theory?” delivered in July 1942, and “The Re-education of Axis Countries Concerning the Jews,” delivered November 7, 1943, include not only Strauss's most elaborate statement about the relation of political philosophy and political practice (in the first), but what may well be his fullest written public statements about matters of contemporary foreign policy. Both lectures obviously were carefully considered, composed, and corrected, but Strauss did not attempt to publish either. He may have had second thoughts about some of the arguments he advanced in these lectures, or he may simply have chosen to concentrate his literary efforts elsewhere. Other lectures he prepared during this period but did not publish himself have since been published: “The Living Issues of German Postwar Philosophy,” delivered April 1940 at Syracuse University, and “Reason and Revelation,” delivered January 1948 at Hartford Theological Seminary, both in Heinrich Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem (Cambridge University Press, 2006); “German Nihilism,” delivered to the New School's General Seminar February 26, 1941, is in Interpretation 26:3 (Spring 1999).