The most important thing to say about Americans and architecture* is that if we value the art of building at all it is usually when it is ancient or exotic or preferably both. This is simply one facet of the general American attitude toward the arts which, if it is changing at all, is changing slowly. Menotti observed some time ago that the typical American father was not very happy if his son asserted that he intended to be a composer. The same uneasiness develops if the son is interested in becoming a ballet dancer, a painter, a poet, an actor, a sculptor, or a physicist, although the sputnik-induced respectability of science and the consequent improvement of the scientist's economic status has, at least for the moment, quieted the parental fears about science as a profession if not as an art. We have to face the fact that at least until very recently the arts and the intellectual pursuits have been peripheral to American life. Calvin Coolidge was true to the current American attitudes when in 1925 he informed the Exposition des Arts Decoratifs that America had no representative contemporary paintings to send. Although there has been some change in the American view of the arts and of artists since then, some increased curiosity about the products, even some improvement in the popular critical taste; although there has been a comparable improvement in the respectability of the artists, the gain has not been great. There may be no country in the civilized world in which the artist is, in the last analysis, held in lower esteem. All this affects what American architecture is, what it has been, and what it is likely to be. For architecture is an art and that must never be forgotten.

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.

Modern historians have not discarded the concept of class as a tool for analysis, but they are increasingly cautious in its use. Even G. D. H. Cole, in his recent Studies in Class Structure, has warned that when this concept is applied to advanced industrial countries, its elusiveness is enhanced as new techniques blur the accepted social divisions.

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.

The humanities are central in today's academic turbulence and in the cultural crisis of which it is a manifestation. The crisis, with its long genealogy and manifold issues in society and the academy, is real enough. The heritage of an age of individualism in which many traditional forms of authority had survived is passing through the ordeal of irrelevance. In exaggerated reaction to the communitarian requirements of society, not to mention industrial society, this heritage is not simply found wanting but is pronounced to be corrupting, misleading or irrelevant. The disparity between institutions, values and received ideas and the needs of society is so great that past experience may also be dismissed as irrelevant for what some will ponderously call “the end of the neolithic age.” Ill-equipped and confused we face the problem of adaptation and innovation required by the encounter of civilizations in our world.

As in all or almost all Shakespeare plays the opening scenes of Macbeth are key to setting up the problem the play addresses. In his Scottish play Shakespeare uses the opening scenes to set the two main contexts in which the regicide, usurpation, tyranny, and fall of the tyrant occur. The two are, we might say, the earthly or political context and the cosmic or superhuman context represented by the witches. In presenting these two contexts Shakespeare appears to be engaging in a dialogue with Machiavelli's Prince, taking cues from Machiavelli's political analysis on how to understand the political character of Scotland and taking issue with Machiavelli's ultimate agenda of a conquest of Fortuna.

The enterprise called political theory is very old; so old that to some it seems to have outlived its time. At long last — 13 years ago to be precise — it was pronounced dead. Since that pronouncement seems not to have been widely heard, or sufficiently heeded, a second certificate testifying to its demise was issued two years later.

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.

Emotional religion was embedded in the hearts of eighteenth-century Britons. The veneer of culture and moderation, so often considered the hallmark of the age of reason, was perilously thin. Conjure up an image of the Gordon Riots of June, 1780, to see the mob, rising in hysterical fear of popery, terrorizing the city of London for a week. From Charles Dickens' classic account in Barnaby Rudge to the recent King Mob of Christopher Hibbert, the saga of those savage days has fascinated historians and readers alike. Few of us remember that the Gordon Riots were merely the climax of organized agitation which had brewed for nearly two years and had already achieved singular success in Scotland. Victory there made possible the London disorders. In Glasgow and Edinburgh, in the intellectual capital of Britain, the heirs of John Knox had rejected the overtures of reason and moderation.

Defeatism is one of the most characteristic attitudes of the present period, though the thing is not as new as the word for it. It is also one of the facts through which modern wars are in part decided, and defeats are brought about. Defeatism, therefore, is at least as important a factor for modern warfare as tanks and planes. And yet, while much is said about these physical means of destruction, little is heard about this psychological medium of destruction, despite the noteworthy fact that defeatism is the very thing aggressors try to attain with their propaganda. The National Socialists, for instance, do not propagandize their own political system if it is obvious from the outset that no converts to their political conception can be made.

In the “metaphysical squabbles” that Bertrand de Jouvenel has said characterize much of American political science, none has been more bitter and perplexing than the controversy surrounding the work of Leo Strauss. To the extent that one can speak of a revival of classical political philosophy in this country, the credit for it assuredly belongs to the influence of Strauss's profound scholarship. Nonetheless there is common agreement among fairminded reviewers of Strauss's writings that a “calculated obscurity” hides his message. “He does not wish to tell us, in bold propositional terms, what is on his mind,” says Robert McShea. Granted that “Strauss indulges in the … game of esoteric silences,” that his real views are often “camouflaged,” we must see these devices for what Lee McDonald suggests they are: devices to persuade the reader to “a special way of reading the ‘classics’”; they are not primarily concerned with “specific details of interpretation.”

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.

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.