I am grateful to Michael Zuckert for his kindness in remembering my birthday—something that I am trying hard to forget—but I am still more grateful for the seriousness and competence with which he has subjected my work to analysis and scrutiny.

With the publication of Harry Jaffa's New Birth of Freedom, it is possible to see the overall trajectory of his thinking and to come to some assessment of it. New Birth redeems a forty-year-old promise for a sequel to Crisis of the House Divided. One problem, however, is that the sequel contradicts many of the claims in Crisis. These differences provide an ingress for reconsidering Jaffa's overall project and, in particular, his relation with his teacher, Leo Strauss.

WithRespect to its international prospects the leadership of the Soviet Union entered this decade with enthusiasm; it is ending the decade on a note of disillusionment. And there is no area in which this phenomenon is more striking than that of the triangular relationship among the Soviet Union, the United Nations and the emerging “third world.” Both the “ups” and the “downs” of this relationship are to some extent attributable to the remarkable influence (and abrupt departure) of a single dynamic and quixotic personality, Nikita Khrushchev. Associated with his rise and fall, however, were objective historical factors which had a significant impact on the course of Soviet foreign relations. Read in the context of the origins and development of Soviet attitudes on international organization and on the role expected of nations liberated by the downfall of imperialism, this decade may well have marked a turning point in history. The outcome is not yet clear, but it is evident that Soviet policy has gone through another of those remarkable shifts from optimistic certainty to pragmatic reassessment which have marked historic moments in the past. The transition is both interesting and instructive.

Historians are fond of looking back over the panorama of the past and writing about periods of cultural change that altered the continuity of history. The age of discovery and the rise of the city are phrases that describe such pivotal epochs. These are not Madison Avenue-inspired book titles, but legitimate interpretative descriptions of past ages that provide a key to understanding the development of American civilization. Although the history of American Catholicism does not lend itself to such epochal descriptions, interpretative concepts are applicable in this area of study as well and they can provide useful keys to the analysis of the past.

THE relations between the Church and State have been for many years the subject of interest to the political theorist, the student of contemporary totalitarian movements, and of particular concern to the student of comparative political institutions and systems. To the student of political theory it invokes the old conflict between the spiritual and the temporal authorities, between the papal authority and the claim of the emerging national states. For the student of modern totalitarianism it raises, without answering, the crucial question of the extent to which a totalitarian system can tolerate competing ideologies within the same national community. Finally, for the student of comparative institutions, in certain circumstances (for example, in Poland), it presents certain features of uniqueness that call for explanation.

OUR understanding of any significant movement in human affairs can hardly be said to even approach completeness until the evidence from literature is in. Because writers of fiction and poetry tend to grope for meanings rather than superimpose them — Yeats called this process the “public dream” —literary criticism can bring to the surface what otherwise might lie buried in the culture's subconscious. And this is perhaps even more true for the history of the Negro in American literature than for other cultural phenomena — the Westering Movement or the Industrial Revolution, for example — since so much of that history has been an unconscious, or at least half-conscious, masking of issues that have been contorted by fear, guilt, and rage.

The Leveller movement of the Puritan Revolution was composed chiefly of people who represented economically the lower middle classes and religiously the Independents and the Sects. Thus, they had a respectable basis, though their enemies claimed otherwise, and while. they were interested in certain political reforms which appeared sweepingly radical for their times, they did recognize the value of a visible church organization (not a state supported church) and the necessity of such fundamentals of English life as the sanctity of property and the existence of government.

When Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik party, was appointed by the second all-Russian Soviet Congress as chairman of the Council of People's Commissars in November 1917, neither he nor his adversaries believed that the new regime would last very long. Trotski tells how a conservative Russian officer helped to defend Petrograd against the advancing troops of the counter-revolution because he hated liberals and democrats and did not believe that the Bolsheviks could stay in power. And Lenin was very proud when he could announce that the Bolshevik regime had lasted longer than the abortive Parisian Commune of 1871.

The contemporary modus operandi of the Soviets in Ethiopia seems in many ways to be a refined and ideologically refurbished version of that of pre-Revolutionary days.

Russia's interest in Ethiopia is centuries old. An offer to join forces with Ethiopia and the Protestant West in the struggle against the Mohammedan Turks reached Moscow before the time of Peter the Great. Hiob Ludolf's pioneer work, Historia Aethiopica, was translated into Russian in the seventeenth century, and, nearly 150 years ago, the teaching of the Amharic language became a part of the Khar'kov University curriculum.

Since the end of World War II British Policy in the Middle East has been plagued by the devils of the past, joined by a more formidable company of contemporary devils, some of whom bear a mocking resemblance to still earlier ones. Most of this region was once largely in the weak hands of the Turkish Empire. In this area, strategic for the control of the Mediterranean and the security of the Suez Canal, British policy had been to support the Turkish Empire against the heavy pressure of Tsarist Russia, until Turkey's association with Germany drove Britain to moderate its rivalry with Russia, to accept her partnership in Persia (1907), following a similar accommodation of differences with France (1904).

During the First World War the British sponsored the Arab Revolt against Turkey, thus shattering the feeble union of those lands, and creating in the Middle East a parody of the Habsburg succession states, complicated by concessions to France (the Sykes-Picot Agreement) and to Zionism (the Balfour Declaration).

National self-determination and the United Nations are modern concepts of political thought. Of the two the first is older and has struck much stronger roots. Its origin can be traced back to the American and French revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century. The latter gained recognition only in the period of the First World War. Both owe their conceptual frame and their ideological content to modem Western civilization, above all to Anglo-American thought. Yet the two concepts are to a degree contradictory: the United Nations envisages an international or supranational order at a time when nationalism—the insistence on national independence, self-determination, and self-expression as supreme political values and emotional guides—has for the first time in history become a world-wide phenomenon.