From the time of Metternich to that of Hitler and Stalin no other figure cast so large a shadow as Bismarck on the pages of European and world history. He began his career in 1862 as the hated minister of a faltering monarchy and of a state which for decades had accepted a secondary position in both Germany and Europe. And yet the political virtuosity of this Pomeranian Junker made him the decisive influence in German political life and the arbiter of European diplomacy for nearly a quarter of a century.

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.

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.

In his Defence (1787–1788), John Adams rebuts French criticism of the legislative checks and balances present in most American constitutions. His aim, however, is not merely to conserve the constitutional status quo. In addition, he seeks to challenge younger Americans to reform all American constitutions by improving the tripartite legislative balance in them. That reform will be possible only on the basis of a reformed political science. Adams designed his Defence to provide his younger audience with that corrected political science, but to do so without undermining the authority and constitutional achievements of their Fathers. He does this primarily by offering an improved specimen of the kind of “reading and reasoning” that had informed the Founding generation. In it he rehabilitates certain “gloomy” authors as useful to republican political science, especially in their understanding of the passion for distinction and its place in republican government.

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.

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.