Rorty's separation between self-creation and political commitment is at the same time one of the pillars of his political theory and one of its most criticized elements. In this paper I offer a novel criticism of this separation, elaborating a comparison between him and the rhetorical-humanistic tradition of Cicero, Quintilian, the Italian Humanists, and Vico. If many have emphasized the deep humanism of Rorty's thought, still unnoticed is the fact that his version of humanism contradicts a basic tenet of that tradition: the idea that the mastery of communicative skills is key to the development of the person both as individual and citizen. As I will show, Rorty's conclusion about the necessity to neatly separate the two realms is in contradiction not only with that tradition but also with the general scope of his own project and the very humanistic picture he himself draws of culture, society, and the intellectuals.

It is now thirty-two years since the death of Woodrow Wilson, one hundred years since his birth, and still the place in history of this Southerner who became president of Princeton University and later President of the United States remains somewhat uncertain. Wilson will rank among the great American presidents, but precisely where his reputation will come to rest is at present difficult to say. His public life has been the subject of intense scholarly investigation. College professors of history and political science have found his career fascinating (perhaps, one suspects, because he was the only college professor to reach the White House). But they have been unable to make up their minds about him. There is a passionate air in the historians' appraisals of Wilson, and more than a hint of assertion and argument, and beneath even the most calm and apparently measured accounts there is intellectual heat of a sort that betrays uncertainty about the stature of the man.

This essay examines the role of “critical spectatorship” in the writings of two distinguished European intellectuals, José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) and Raymond Aron (1905–1983). We begin the paper by commenting on the struggle between civilization and barbarism, a fundamental topic in their works. We then examine the rhetoric of going beyond the political left and right, which both Ortega and Aron used in their writings. Next, we turn to the concept of “critical spectatorship” that is central to their thought and comment on the similarities and differences between their forms of social and political criticism. We conclude by drawing a few conclusions on the relevance of Ortega's and Aron's ideas for us today.

The works of Kliuchevskii, from the Boyar Council of Old Russia and studies of saints and historians to the five-volume Course of Russian History, advanced philosophy of history, even though he thought creating such a view impossible. In the judgment of Russia's most influential historian, neither intellectuals nor rulers nor liberals nor conservatives determined the course of events. Instead, the endless interaction of constantly shifting elements gradually produced change, helping every period in a nation's past to ripen into its successor. Almost invisible changes within the economy, social groups, and administration and the gradual growth of Western influence over centuries constituted the steps that determined Russian history's slow flow. Kliuchevskii never read Marx and Marxist thought did not affect him, but he awakened many to the role of economic forces and helped prepare for some Russians' acceptance of Marxism.

The philosopher is first and foremost a human being whose humanity must be served by his academic profession if it is not to be irremediably pretentious, farcical, and corrupt. This is the Voegelinian paradigm. The present essay argues that anybody who is seriously interested in understanding Eric Voegelin as he understood himself is obliged to come to grips with the issues evoked by the perspectives this statement suggests. It is further argued that several general consequences follow: (a) underlining the loving tension toward divine Reality in open existence as central; (b) abandoning doctrinal fixation of separating faith and reason as supernatural and natural, respectively; (c) discarding as egophany the arrogant pretense of autonomous reason as its originator in self-sufficient human speculators; and (d) constantly remembering that devotion to the discipline and conventions of inquiry and of society must ever defer to devotion to the truth of existence.

It is now conventional in both pedagogical and scholarly venues to characterize Thucydides as a “realist.” Few, however, have noted that the first major writer to describe him in these terms is not Machiavelli or Hobbes (alongside whom he is frequently placed), but Friedrich Nietzsche. This article seeks to investigate the particular character of Thucydides's realism through a close reading of Nietzsche's discussions of Thucydides and his History. Three interpretations are explored: realism as a mode of investigating or understanding the world, realism as a set of ideas about the possibilities of establishing grounds for justice in the world, and realism as a matter of character.

In 1934 Waldemar Gurian had the wriest of pleasures, when he was forced to recognize that his very pessimistic analysis of the National-Socialist movement was correct. He fled from Germany to Switzerland where he was soon joined by his wife and daughter. In the extremely straitened circumstances of an emigré, soon to receive official notification that he was a stateless person, he had to face simultaneously the tasks of earning a living and of carrying on his work as a Catholic writer who combined scholarship and publicism. He was a profound student of Bolshevism. But his study, personal experience and the progress of events emphasized that Europe then faced a more dangerous threat than Russian Bolshevism. The threat stemmed from the control of Germany by the National-Socialists, who skilfully exploited a moral crisis in Germany and all of Europe, to gain and, then systematically and totally, to consolidate power in Germany. The menace to Europe was all the more dire, because the Nazis had disguised their totalitarian movement in the mask of anti-Bolshevism and so the danger went unrecognized.

While our subject is the very broad one of “History and Diplomacy,” I thought I would narrow it somewhat and attempt merely to describe something of the aspect in which diplomatic history presents itself to a diplomatist who has turned late in life to the study and writing of history.* In doing so, I hope that I have not taken too great a liberty with the subject our hosts had in mind.

In the eighteen-nineties there took place in Russia, at a time of rapid industrial advance under the “Witte System,” one of those great debates which seem to catch hold of the basic problems shaping the destiny of generations. In those years a group of narodnik writers led by Vasilii Vorontsov and Nikolai Daniel'son disputed with a young generation of Marxists the future of capitalism in Russia. By capitalism these writers understood the current process of industrialization, which had been started after the Crimean War and had reached such extraordinary proportions by the mid-nineties. In surveying and evaluating the effects of this unprecedented development these writers, both narodnik and Marxist, laid bare an intricate fabric of economic difficulties and hostile emotional responses, which has accompanied, if not altogether determined the course of industrialization in Russia. And not in Russia alone: this great debate had its counterparts in backward countries all over the world. Its echoes are still heard in the discussions of Point Four projects and United Nations publications on the industrialization of underdeveloped areas.

If eamon de Valera were an ordinary politician, the question of to what extent his behavior conformed to any given principle would be insignificant, for we expect all ordinary politicians to clothe their actions with high principled rhetoric. But Eamon de Valera is more than a politician. He has become a nearly mythic figure in Irish political history. Quite consciously, he has contrived to present himself as the premier statesman of post-British Ireland. De Valera is different from any politician presently on the North American or British political stage, for he has projected his actions not on the silver screen of the possible, but against the hard wall of principle.

In his monumental encyclical, Pacem in Terris, Pope John XXIII addressed himself to men of all religions and political allegiance. This historic message contained a forceful plea for world peace and for a public authority of world-wide jurisdiction, capable of working for the universal common good. Although Pope John recognized the merits of the United Nations and other intergovernmental agencies, he advocated the establishment of public authority “in a position to operate in an effective manner on a world-wide basis.” He emphasized that in our time “the universal common good poses problems of world-wide dimensions, which cannot be adequately tackled or solved except by the efforts of public authority endowed with a wideness of powers, structure and means of the same proportions.”