Despite recent interest in Michael Oakeshott's work, his aesthetics have yet to receive an extended consideration. The paper surveys Oakeshott's writings on the character of art and provides a critical account of how his aesthetics complements his moral philosophy. Through his aesthetics Oakeshott provides his moral philosophy with an idea of authenticity. Societies and individuals that have failed to recognize the poetic dimension in the moral life suffer a corruption of consciousness. Far from the poetic dimension of the moral life being responsible for nihilism and aestheticism as some critics have argued, its recognition saves the moral life from becoming a pursuit of arbitrary preferences.

TheInk used by the signers of the Declaration of Independence barely had time to dry before Americans began talking about a national literature. Debate was initiated which went on actively for 75 years — and indeed is still occasionally revived. From the first, two aspects of the subject were considered, two steps were recognized as necessary. The first was the problem of definition: what should be the materials of an American literature and what should be the spirit and purpose of American writers. The second was, of course, the actual creation of a body of literary work which should be recognizably and worthily American.

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.

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.

In an important 1984 paper, “The Moral Education Theory of Punishment,” Jean Hampton argues that the practice of inflicting painful criminal punishments is justified only if punishment is morally educative. Hampton's suggestion forms the point of departure for this article on Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. I show that Dostoevsky agrees with Hampton that punishment should aim at moral reform; however, Dostoevsky presents no evidence that self-punishment or legal punishment reliably cultivates respect for law, legal authority, oneself, or others as moral agents. Instead, Dostoevsky's post-Siberian writings are highly critical of Russian criminal justice, and emphasize that moral education comes through dialogue, reflection, and criticism. This highly individualized treatment may be experienced as painful, but it does not have to result from, and it may even be impeded by, legal “hard treatment.”

Not so long ago, a unified chorus of scholars, politicians, and activists declared that the time had come to move “beyond” toleration. Such an offensive orientation of de haut en bas indulgence towards difference may have been appropriate to warring Christian sects after the Reformation. But in this brave, new, and emphatically global world of unprecedented cultural, racial, and gender diversity, “mere” and musty toleration must give way to something more—to respect, recognition, even acceptance, or perhaps a positive conception of tolerance comprising the better features of all three.

A friend of mine has the misfortune of owning a number of stone cottages. I say “misfortune” because the cottages are in Scotland, and their rents are fixed at the level of 1914. The cottages were built long before 1914—some of them are eighteenth-century work, with their pantiled roofs and trick rubble walls and irregular little windows; but they are good to look upon still, with their white door-sills and their little gardens along the path to the road. The law compels my friend to keep them in tolerable repair, if they are tenanted, and to pay most of what rent he receives either to local authorities or to the Exchequer, in the form of rates and income-taxes. But the rent of each cottage amounts to a mere five shillings a week—seventy cents, at the present rate of exchange. This is not particularly depressing to my friend, for the rents of his farms are fixed at levels no higher than they were during the Napoleonic wars, let alone the First World War. The cottages are a cause of expense to him, of course, rather than a source of income; but persons of his station are now resigned to being ruined, and for some of his cottages he asks no rent at all, letting them to old people who can afford to pay next to nothing. Some of his tenants, however, are better off, according to their lights, than my friend himself: they have risen in the economic scale while he has descended. His income is still much greater than theirs, but his expenses are much greater, and his responsibilities. These tenants now have better wages and shorter hours than ever they did before; they can afford their little luxuries, extending sometimes to television-sets. Some of them have come to look upon rent as a luxury—for, after all, many of their neighbors are the recipients of my friend's charity, paying nothing for their cottages. Accordingly, my friend's agent occasionally has his difficulties when he goes from door to door, on Mondays, collecting five shillings here and five shillings there. One morning the agent knocked at the door of a tenant who was in good health and employed at good wages. The tenant came to the door and announced that he had decided to pay no more rent; he could not afford it; prices were high, and he could use that five shillings himself.

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 relationship between philosophy, revelation, and politics is a basic intellectual theme, either at the forefront or in the background, of all political philosophy. The 1998 publication of John Paul II's encyclical Fides et Ratio occasioned much reflection on the relation of reason and revelation. Though not directly concerned with political philosophy, this encyclical provides a welcome opportunity to address many theologicalpolitical issues that have arisen in classic and contemporary political philosophy. The argument here states in straightforward terms how philosophy and theology, as understood in the Roman Catholic tradition, can be coherently related to fundamental questions that have legitimately recurred in the works of the political philosophers.

When the Watergate dam broke, the ensuing flood of revelations about White House activities swept away a fundamental and cherished tenet of the contemporary liberal credo: the faith in the beneficence of the American presidency. Already suspect after John Kennedy's Bay of Pigs fiasco and Lyndon Johnson's Indochina policy, the dogma that “the cure for democracy is leadership,” strong, forceful presidential leadership, sank beneath the waves of Watergate. The lesson seems clear that it is naive to assume that an innate goodness characterizes the presidency. Rather it seems safer to accept the proposition that executive power, unchecked or only loosely restrained, can be used for whatever purposes a particular president seeks to promote.

In June, 1974, the two Germanys completed the official “normalization of relations” between them. In the annals of diplomatic history this final act was unique. The two states exchanged, not ambassadors, but “permanent representatives.” Of these, the West German envoy was accredited to East Berlin's foreign ministry as the representative of a foreign country. His East German counterpart, on the other hand, was to deal with the Federal Chancellery in Bonn, in accordance with West Germany's view of the special nature of the East-West German relationship. The West Germans insisted that while there was no longer one German state, there still existed one German nation; this precluded the treatment of the two Germanys as foreign countries. The German Democratic Republic (GDR), however, maintained that not only had the one German state come to an end, but that there existed now, along with the two states, two different nations, one socialist, the other bourgeoiscapitalist. Because of the wholly different systems on which they were based, East and West Germany had nothing in common anymore and constituted two entirely separate, hence foreign, countries. As such, they could establish contact with each other only by means of the customary diplomatic relations. The complex procedure by which relations were in the end established was a compromise between these differing views.