WHEN looking over the immense literature devoted to laborproblems by philosophers, moralists, economists and sociologists, the philosophically-minded reader cannot help being struck by the fact that these writers, for the most part, abstain from defining what they intend to designate by the terms work, labor, worker, and workman. When any definition is given, there is small likelihood that it may meet the elementary requirement of embracing all the defined object and only the defined object. This current deficiency of studies on labor, although worth noting, is not particularly astonishing: everybody knows that the most familiar realities, those with which we are ceaselessly concerned in our daily life, are exceedingly difficult to express in the form of a logically satisfactory definition. In that connection, the so-called Socratic dialogues of Plato are full of profitable lessons. As soon as the persons are asked to define virtues most commonly spoken of, they become entangled in a net of contradictions, and sometimes the dialogue comes to an end without bringing forth any conclusion.

Tocqueville's account of judging unites two concerns separated in recent debates over constitutional interpretation, use of discretion to serve the rule of law and respect for tradition. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey the majority upholding Roe is properly concerned with rule of law, while Justice Scalia properly criticizes departures from text and tradition. However, both evince a skepticism which undermines these concerns. This raises differences between American constitutionalism prior to Holmes and the rival strains of legal realism now dominant. Tocqueville's judicial statesmanship would perpetuate the Constitution by preserving the principles of its letter and spirit. Holmesean judges lack the classic common law basis of this jurisprudence and should not exercise discretion unguided by our founding principles. The jurisprudence of individualism yielded by activist Holmesean skepticism is inadequately opposed by Holmesean skeptical restraint and better addressed by a common law constitutionalism.

Mark Gibian's major study of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.'s political theory casts Holmes as a democratic pluralist in the line of Richard Rorty who instantiates his commitment in the literary form of untrammeled table talk. Gibian's thesis can be challenged through a close reading of Holmes's main political work, The Professor at the Breakfast Table, revealing that Holmes's defense of free expression as the core of American national identity is counterpointed by a more fundamental appeal to nondiscursive reconciliation. Treating The Professor as a “dramatized essay” or “proto-novel” opens the possibility that the work's meaning is most fully disclosed by placing conversation in tandem with the deeds and recorded gestures that develop its plot. Through a dramatic reading, Holmes emerges as a humanist balancing aristocratic and democratic principles, rather than as a liberal discourse analyst.

It is said by some observers of politics and foreign policy that morality has nothing to do with the vital issues of national and international politics. Experienced practitioners note that seldom if ever are moral issues invoked in serious policy discussions; politics and foreign policy are a practical art in which interest and power prevail. Others take issue with this view claiming that from its history America has derived a high responsibility unique among states to stand for certain moral ends and purposes. From its history it has been a nation set apart; its place in the world is dependent on faithfulness to its founding creed embodied in the Declaration of Independence and other statements down to the Atlantic Charter.

This article examines the discussion among Russian scholars and activists concerning the principles of political liberalism in Soviet Russia during the Gorbachev era (1985–1991) and in independent Russia during the Yeltsin presidency (1991-present). After a review of the emergence of liberalism during the Gorbachev years, the analysis focuses on three models of political liberalism which have emerged in the context of Russian postcommunist state construction. Each competing model of liberalism—statist, rule of law, and social—offers a different vision of the principles of political liberalism and the strategies necessary to institutionalize liberalism as the foundation of the postcommunist polity.

THE “emergence of the Catholic layman” in the United States which has been heralded sofrequently since the opening of the Second Vatican Council has tended to do a grave injustice to the American Catholic layman of earlier generations. It is true that many of the leading American Catholiclaymen of the nineteenth century were converts from Protestantism, and there were few opportunities for the first generation immigrant Catholic to achieve higher education outside the seminaries. Nevertheless, the “Generation of the Third Eye” has not produced a philosopher of the depth or comprehension of Orestes A. Brownson, nor a defender of orthodoxy of the knowledge and capacity of James A. McMaster nor has it surpassed such men as Roger B. Taney, John Scott, and William J. Read who were called in to address the first Provincial Council of Baltimore, or Richard Clarke who tried to form the first Catholic union in the United States. The number of prominent Catholic laymen and laywomen of the nineteenth century is large as can be seen in the mere listing of the galaxy that participated in the two lay Catholic Congresses in Baltimore in 1889 and Chicago in 1893. Of all these, James McMaster has no equal in his influence on the religious and theological development of American Catholicism.

“As I returned, here—I did not return.” With these words of Alfred Doeblin, Eric Voegelin could also have described his German experience of the years 1958 through 1969. That is valid in a general sense, to speak with the poet: “You are no longer the one who left, and you no longer find the home that you left. You don&t know it when you leave, but you suspect it on the way back.” And it is valid in a special sense too, namely, for Voegelin's relationship to German political science. Here too he remained a stranger among strangers, although his presence in Munich left behind important and lasting impulses. Yet a wider reception of his work in Germany came only with delays, and more outside than inside the guild, so that to this day there exists a substantial need of reconsideration by scholars as well as students. Beginners above all encounter in handbooks and introductions only arid clichés about the “Munich School” and its peculiarity, described with few exceptions stereotypically, as “ontological-normative.” But the central figure of Eric Voegelin remains remarkably dimly lit. All the more welcome, then, are the efforts of the initiators of this symposium to illuminate the details of Voegelin's effects in the postwar era. And more welcome still is the long neglected presentation of his major work, Order and History, in German.

TenYears after Bismarck's creation of the Reich, a Swabian philosopher, Karl Christian Planck, bitterly regretted in his posthumous Testament of a German, that “our people has now entered, similar therein to the Jewish people, its period of selfish national messianism.” Like an Old Testament prophet, he regarded the German nation-state armed to the teeth as a perversion of the true Germany. “If such a universalist people, situated in the heart of Europe, forms in sharp contrast to its preceding history a centralist nation-state and sets before its neighbor nations an example of increased armament, what can result in an age of acute nationalism but total conflict?” Planck foresaw the war of 1914, but he hoped that out of it a reformation of Germany would come. He was too optimistic; the defeat of 1918 brought no reformation but an intensification of the trends of the Bismarckian Reich. With German scholarship leading the march to the abyss, the gulf between Germany and the West grew wider during the Weimar Reich. Thus the catastrophe of 1933 came about, and this in turn led to the war of 1939. The developments after that war, however, fulfilled Planck's hope for a reformation of Germany, for the rise of a new spirit.

Thomas Paine's social-contract theory, which asserts the protection of individual rights as the sole end of civil society and the consent of the majority of individuals as the sole source of government's authority, may seem to be better suited to the democratic Constitution of the United States than Edmund Burke's theory of prescription of government. Burke's theory is based on the rational moral goals of civil society, not on the supremacy of the people's or any other will. It asserts that the natural ends of society are prior to rights as Paine and other radical democrats conceived of them and that natural obligation is prior to and controls consent. Burke can therefore afford us a more realistic interpretation of popular consent and of the Constitution as the political form that makes us a people. He also offers a useful corrective to the currently popular view of the Supreme Court's function as being primarily to protect an ever-expanding array of constitutional rights. Burke was no democrat but he may help democrats to overcome the limitations of the liberal contractarian model of society.

InSpite of a continued gradual increase of American-Soviet contacts, the official Soviet image of the United States in 1959 was shaped, as before, largely by a combination of preconcert tion and contrivance. The massive Soviet machinery of communication continued to present to the peoples of the Soviet Union a picture of America based less on empirical judgment than on the application to changing circumstances of unchanging attitudes. As in the past, the Kremlin's image of America and of the West in general appeared to be as much an instrument for the manipulation of foreign and Soviet public opinion as it was a reflection of Moscow's appraisal of international political forces. The official doctrine of irreconcilable struggle between Soviet “socialism” and Western “capitalism” held undiminished significance for the rationalization and legitimization of Kremlin power and policy.

The classical theory of totalitarianism provided unequalled insights into the nature of the Stalinist system. Its prevailing interpretation, however, proved grossly inadequate to conceptualize and explain the changes of the post-Stalinist period. Because of this, there appeared a strong tendency to reject the “totalitarian model” and, in addition, to discredit it politically, as serving the aims of the cold war. The present article tries to show that emphasizing the importance of changes did not require a wholesale dismantling of the totalitarian theory. On the contrary: the notion of totalitarianism should be preserved as an ideal-typical construct, adequately explaining the militantly ideological phase in the development of communism; the evolution of the system in its postideological phase should be explained as detotalitarization, that is, essentially, as a disintegrating process, paving the way for the so-called collapse of communism. The author analyzes the consecutive stages of the detotalitarization process in post-Stalinist Poland and thus explains the collapse of Polish communism not as a sudden, miraculous change, but as the last link in a long chain of events. He rejects the view that Polish People's Republic was “totalitarian to the end” as having no theoretical justification at all—although still being useful in the political struggle against postcommunist forces.

The legitimate goals of political communities and the proper objectives of law have been themes of political philosophy since its inception. Philosophers' disagreements about the nature of political life and law have occasioned divergent accounts of the best or ideal government and have generated an even deeper controversy as to whether the best case should be the measure of political phenomena in the first place. For the purpose of analysis, three kinds of political theories can be distinguished. Characteristic of the first kind is the belief that people can attain a wide range of excellences and that the function of a political community is to foster in a direct manner the best or most complete form of human excellence, regardless of how rare the individuals who profit from this guidance. Accordingly, a central concern of “idealistic” or “utopian” political philosophy is elaborating the nature of the absolutely best political order and the conditions of its emergence. Among the central activities of governments so conceived are moral and intellectual education, as presented, for example, in the works of Plato and Aristotle. A second kind of political theory shares the belief in a multiplicity of hierarchically ranked human ends but denies that the highest possibility for human development should serve as the foremost principle determining political institutions and governing political decisionmaking.

Lonergan's cognitional theory, though generally unknown in the discipline, points the way toward a more concrete understanding of politics through its emphasis on the self-appropriation of our knowing. This article examines the invariant structure or method Lonergan finds in all practical or scientific knowing, the precepts that can be derived from the operations of the mind, the continuity between cognitive and moral self-transcendence, and the different horizons which may confine our knowing. It considers the biases which distort personal and political development, the need for cosmopolis, an informal community which helps to save practicality by transcending it, the methodological natural right which may be derived from norms inherent in our knowing, and the emergent probability of progress or decline set by the stock of insights or oversights operative in a society. It concludes that Lonergan's work makes a substantial contribution to the critical human science he seeks and that it could play a helpful role in unifying the discipline.