Most studies of presidential power assume that legitimacy is derived from the Constitution. This essay argues that presidents can become authors of their own legitimacy, whether understood in normative or behavioral terms. Specifically, the thesis is that presidential assertions of power, cloaked in an antipower rhetoric which formally honors the dominant values of the culture, have created an American state that has served as an extraconstitutional source of presidential legitimacy. It is widely believed that American constitutionalism undermined the state by destroying sovereignty. Lincoln's interpretation and use of the war power, however, denned a supreme national authority located in the presidency. In addition, his Gettysburg Address provided a paradigmatic metaphor for concealing presidential power rhetorically. Subsequent presidents have taken advantage of both effects by attempting to assert power as revolutionary principle. Linguistically, these concealments are reflected in tropes which constitute legitimizing defenses for exercise of extraordinary power.

On Marx's characteristic — although not wholly consistent—view, an ideology is a false theory (or, in his own words, a form of “false consciousness”) of a special kind, namely, one that serves to mask or “rationalize” the unpleasant realities of a given socioeconomic system. Lenin drastically expanded the sense of the term, making ideology equivalent to theory, whether rational or “rationalizing,” and to knowledge, whether adequate or inadequate. Leninists regard all knowledge as “superstructurally” determined by socioeconomic relationships, and thus, in “class society,” partisan to the interests of a given class.

Heinrich Ritter von Srbik, the foremost Austrian historian in the interwar period, made important contributions to knowledge of the materials and the facts of nineteenthcentury Germany history as well as to the interpretation of that period. No historian of Germany can properly ignore his interpretation of that period. Yet no serious attempt has been made to evaluate his historical thinking and to appraise his extensive contributions to German historical literature. The one exception to this neglect followed his death in 1951 which occasioned the customary obituary notices of his career and work.

InAustralian Hopes and Fears Colin Clark appears at one point or another in all of his several guises: statistician, economist, newspaper commentator on public affairs, and exponent of a Roman Catholic Weltanschauung. He has written several earlier books which embrace the first two and steadiest of his regular employments, notably The Conditions of Economic Progress, and he has written a very great deal in a miscellany of newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets which falls under the latter heads, but this, I think, is the first occasion on which he has given expression to the several facets of his mind in a single book. The result is utterly fascinating, not least because of Clark's extraordinary capacity for stating highly provocative views in a “dead pan” fashion, as though uttering dusty platitudes. No reader unacquainted with the Australian scene will fully appreciate just how often Clark sets a cat among the pigeons, nor how adept he is at redefining cats and pigeons. The reader must proceed, constantly on the alert for what on earth is coming next, this in spite of the fact that much of the book is ostensibly straight exposition. Clark's willingness to take the risks of discrimination and judgment within his particular frame of reference keeps his writing lively. The question one really has in mind all along is whether or not he takes all the facts into account before phrasing his pointed conclusions.

Scholars often assume Émile seeks to educate readers to become like Émile. However, I suggest that by calling upon his readers to act as judges, Rousseau's aim is not for readers to copy Émile, but to educate them to act as independent judges. The first section of this article argues that Émile's education fails to teach him this kind of judgment. He never learns to navigate the interdependent relationships created by property ownership or family life. Rather, as explored in the second section, Sophie's education offers a better style of judgment. The article concludes with a consideration of the reader's education as distinct from that of either Émile or Sophie. By emulating Sophie readers do not become like her. Rather, through comparing the characters and situations Rousseau presents in Émile and “Émile et Sophie,” readers learn to judge for themselves.

In his literary masterwork, the Decameron, Boccaccio undertakes a thorough examination of human values along the lines he had drawn in his history of the origins of the gods, the Genealogie deorum gentilium libri, on the assumption that values, in a world emptied of the gods, retain a similarly normative and aggregating function. To Boccaccio both gods and values are transient items in a moral ontology that acknowledges only one set of perennial items: natural impulses and dispositions. Boccaccio adopts a particular stance towards the emergence of values: genealogy is, for him, a distinctive way to examine the processes whereby beliefs, attitudes, and values come about.

In actual regimes as described by Aristotle, authoritative civic choices were not the outcome of speech among citizens about the noble things and the just things. Rather, he saw them as products of the flawed presuppositions and misperceptions of dominant factions. Since he held that the human good was dependent on the persistence of lawful systems of rule, no matter how flawed, he viewed the tendency of dominant factions toward regime-destructive extremism as the fundamental political problem. His short-term response was to teach manipulative rhetoric and the outline of a strategy for regime preservation to his students. This equipped his students to prevail against the speech of the ignorant and malevolent and impressed those students with the need to acquire political knowledge. His long-term response was the initiation of a system of education that would turn citizens away from regime-destructive predilections.

South Africa's policy of “separate development” of the races is an enduring feature in that Republic's predicament but the theory and practice of Apartheid have been changing. During the last fifteen years the policy has undergone a fundamental transformation.

Remorselessly, and apparently inevitably, as 1976 ticks away, the death toll in the tangled Irish Troubles creeps higher, faster this year than any time since 1972—the vintage year for blood and turmoil. Except for the threatened, no one any longer seems greatly to care. Murder must be peculiarly grisly or quite spectacular to warrant more than cursory coverage in any but Irish journals. The dramatic detonation of a mine under the British ambassador's Jaguar outside Dublin in July engendered, briefly, media interest. Ambassadors are not assassinated every day, but in Ulster ordinary people are—or nearly every day. There have been too many nowarning bombs in pubs to remember, too many sprawled bodies discovered by pedestrians to concern any but the devastated relatives. The Provisional IRA's self-imposed truce has eroded and again there are bombs in Belfast, land mines in South Armagh, snipers in Derry. The British army and especially the Ulster police have become prime targets. Yet the Republicans feud among themselves. The Loyalist paramilitaries still pursue a strategy of random assassination and thus have unleashed a vicious, seemingly irreversible, cycle of tit-for-tat murders. Politicians, warders, judges are targets of assassins of various faiths. And the violence has been exported. There are bombs in Manchester and Birmingham, assassins in Kensington and gunmen firing into restaurants in London's West End, explosions in the underground, firebombs in the shops. The Loyalist paramilitaries have carried their war into the Irish Republic with explosions in crowded streets. The elegant Gresham and Shelbourne hotels have been bombed in Dublin and lesser resort establishments hit elsewhere. The greatest single slaughter, twenty-six people killed, came in a Dublin street, not in Belfast or Derry. No one sees an end. Even the hope that mutual exhaustion might bring an end to violence has flickered out.

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.”

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.