Although largely neglected in the literature, Benjamin Constant was one of Rousseau's most powerful and subtle nineteenth-century critics. In the first part of this essay, I have revived Constant's criticism of Rousseau's conception of freedom and tyranny. In the second part, I have provided counterfactual evidence in an attempt to show how Rousseau would have responded to Constant's interpretation. By demonstrating both Constant's criticism and Rousseau's defense, I have depicted the relationship between these two thinkers as a dialogue — a dialogue on the meaning of freedom and tyranny.

The characteristically Aristotelian defense of the city's authority over its members is summarized in the statements “every city exists by nature” and “man is by nature a political animal.” These doctrines distinguish Aristotle not only from such of his predecessors as the Sophists and Plato but also from two leading schools of contemporary political thought, liberalism and Marxism. Aspiring to assess the merits of Aristotle's unique approach to the problem of political authority, this paper examines Aristotle's teaching on the relationship between nature and the city. This relationship is shown to be far more complex than is implied in the doctrine that the city is natural. I conclude by wondering why Aristotle addressed the problem of political authority with a doctrine he shows to be merely provisional and why he addressed it with this particular provisional doctrine.

This is an attempt to map out the wide variety of party-dominated democratic systems in the light of concern about the seeming decline of party government in the face of contemporary challenges. The object is to determine the parameters of their institutional, mobilization, and policymaking patterns that may constitute a reasonable definition of party government. With the help of qualitative attribute tables, sixteen systems are compared, including some non-European and some marginal cases. The most important variables indicating a high degree of conformity to the model, not surprisingly, turn out to be an executive-dominated parliamentary system, a bipolar, Left-Right-based party system, a degree of centralization, and considerable problem-solving capacity, even if the parties play only a limited role in policymaking.

This essay critically explores the efforts of John Stuart Mill and contemporary Millian scholarship to provide a utilitarian justification for a categorical principle of personal liberty. What is distinctive about Mill's argument is its pronounced emphasis upon character development as an essential constituent of happiness; the heart of the argument is that freedom of choice promotes a kind of elevated or worthy human character upon which happiness ultimately depends. Hence, society must be prevented from imposing any conventional or customary morality which would restrict individual autonomy. This case for the sovereignty of personal autonomy is infected with a number of difficulties and ambiguities. Central among these are weighty problems associated with Mill's crucial concept of individuality and its relation to human excellence or nobility of character. The refinements upon Millian doctrine introduced by his current supporters do not, and cannot, resolve its inherent ambiguities.

Portraits of heroes and leaders have been among the most widely diffused and deeply cherished of all political symbols. The political functions of such portraits grow out of distinctive semiotic qualities that set the portrait apart from other types of symbols. Judging from their public reception, George Washington's portraits — and, we believe, many state portraits — have the qualities of likeness, manifestiveness, moral efficaciousness, and sacredness that traditionally were ascribed to religious icons. From these qualities the state portrait gains a special power to bridge the distances of space and time and bring a society's representative men and women to living presence for its members. By evoking loyalties and attachments not only to the persons portrayed but also to the larger collectivities that those persons represent, state portraits function as important agencies of political integration and solidarity.

John Stuart Mill's commitment to empirically based inductive logic shapes the political substance of his theory, limiting his ability effectively to make the argument he wishes to make. The Subjection of Women is presented as a test case in which Mill wishes to argue for the justice and utility of the emancipation of women. His efforts are thwarted by his inability to argue from anything but an empirical basis, grounding his evidence in historical data which serve both to stereotype women's “good” qualities and to judge women's potential by what is observable from an admittedly unjust history.

The essay reviews respected feminist analyses of Mill with an eye to establishing the natures and limitations of the various perspectives. It briefly discusses Mill's System of Logic which provides a detailed example, in pure form, of the methodological problems he faces in the Subjection. The essay then considers the method and content of The Subjection of Women, arguing that the shortcomings of Mill's political analysis are the result of his efforts to cling to an impossibly “pure” empiricist methodology.

The political covenant in Hobbes's Leviathan involves “more than consent, or concord; it is a real unity … made by covenant of every man with every man.” But is it possible for essentially separate individuals to merge their identity with the sovereign power and, if so, how? It is possible, initially, because each man shares a common desire for peace. However, this desire is “contrary to our natural passions” and is largely ineffectual until, through the device of a political covenant, it acquires the institutional support of the sovereign power. The will to peace is the essence of sovereignty; the establishment of a secure peace is its end. Ideally, the sovereign will operate within the parameters of legitimacy thus established. As a result of the political covenant, man's passions are contained, but the subject also acquires an enhanced ability to order his own actions in accordance with the will to peace.

The Lion and the Unicorn has remained the most obscure of Orwell's major works, condemned both as a propagandistic attempt to enlist the British left in the war effort and for its erroneous prediction that the war could not been won without a socialist revolution in Britain. Yet it can also be read as Orwell's greatest single attempt to define the values of the democratic socialism to which he adhered from 1936 until his death. Patriotism represented for Orwell not the temporary need to fight for one's country, but the essential decency and democratic bias of British customs and institutions, which he believed could be wedded to socialism without producing totalitarianism. The preservation of these qualities he identified in particular with the working classes, which illuminates his views of them in his later works and demonstrates the continuity of Orwell's thought on this important political issue.

Declaring his departure from the modes and orders of his predecessors— especially the creators of imaginary republics and principalities (men like Plato, Aristotle and Augustine) — Machiavelli undertakes to show “whoever understands” a new and more promising road to political salvation and personal well-being. So compelling is Machiavelli's rhetoric that we seem to have forgotten just how “realistic” or “moderate” Machiavelli's predecessors we're, and how “unrealistic” or “immoderate” Machiavelli's own teaching is. This essay attempts to bring to light the extremism which underlies Machiavelli's realism and raises doubts about his ability to provide his readers the security he promises.

Ronald Dworkin's legal essays have provoked considerable commentary on the nature of rights, law, and judging. Curiously unexplored, however, is the central claim of his work: that it presents a coherent and liberal theory of law. This article examines that claim and finds that Dworkin is most successful in establishing two propositions: (1) in “hard cases” at law there are “right answers” and (2) “articulate consistency” is the appropriate method of discovering and expressing them. Neither of these propositions, however, has any essential relation to the individual rights that he admonishes us to take seriously. Moreover, the right which Dworkin takes most seriously, “equal concern and respect,” rests upon a foundation incompatible with his argument on behalf of “right answers.” Thus, Dworkin's theory of law is neither coherent nor liberal.

This article describes and analyzes a number of complications involved in presidential image identification and assessment (including distinctions among the various categories of summit diplomacy), selected images of past presidents, the role of the media, opinion polls, and surveys of “experts” in reflecting presidential images and prestige, and more precisely the president's image as diplomat in chief. Included are a description of the fluctuation in individual president's popularity ratings as related to selected foreign relations events, a comparative table of high, low, and average popular approval ratings for recent presidents beginning with Franklin Roosevelt, a comparative table of superior presidential rankings by “experts” throughout our history, and a table, with commentary, of presidential popular rating shifts following major summit ventures of the president since 1941. This article constitutes an introductory macro-treatment of the generalized aggregate of contemporary and historical perceptions of the president as diplomat in chief.

In order to defend participatory democracy in large-member voluntary organizations, Michels's challenge to traditional democratic theory must be answered. By arguing that the technical, sociological, and psychological processes of modern organizations invariably result in leaders dominating members, Michels questioned democratic theorists' assertions that participation is self-reinforcing and that participation produces popular control. Defending participatory democracy, then, involves showing how the problems of participation and popular control can be overcome in formally representative organizations. The answer proposed is that collective solidarity or community formed by those reacting to injustice and committed to egalitarian social relations provides the motivation for mass participation and the basis for popular control in modern union and party organizations.

The article first examines the ways in which Richard Neustadt's Presidential Power attempts to connect the activities of power-seeking presidents to the public ends their actions presumably further and then discusses what is problematic in these linkages. The critique focuses on the defects in Neustadt's concept of the “grain of history,” the diminished sense of public purposes revealed by the standard of “viability,” the difficulties in evaluating presidential actions with the criteria developed and the ways in which the failed linkage between the means to power and the ends served undermines Neustadt's own teaching. The paradoxical quality of Presidential Power, in which insightful analysis of the means to power is combined with unsatisfactory discussion of the purposes for which that power is to be employed, is seen as possibly rooted in Neustadt's tacit acceptance of positivist and historicist views, which are now increasingly called into question. The article contends that those concerned with the separation of the normative and the empirical begin efforts to reconnect presidential power to public purpose by going beyond the terms of Neustadt's argument and by reexamining the American Founding for what it may suggest about the intended ends of politics and the presidency.

Political science is in a state of crisis today. The crisis is the result of the scientistic predicament. Man has become the victim of his own reason and knowledge. Scientific rationality and value-neutral theories of knowledge lead to the eclipse of the public realm and the growth of social regimentation, mass manipulation, large-scale indoctrination and totalitarian domination. As a result, the homo politicus is reduced to the homo faber and the animal laboran. What is required is a radical shift in our intellectual perspective. Phenomenological and linguistic-analytical theories of action are inadequate to provide a sound basis for political science. Philosphia perennis alone can restore to politics its full glory and splendor.

President Truman's statesmanship consists in the fact that his administration's foreign policy fused moral principle and national self-interest and that his articulation of foreign policy educated citizens in the principles of the American regime and in the nature of the threat to it. The Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan address vital strategic interests, but Truman's conception of the national interest contained a lucid sense of political meaning and purpose in his understanding that the perpetuation of freedom in America required a resolute defense of republicanism elsewhere in the world. Like Lincoln, Truman was committed to the prudent containment of an expansionist power, and for Truman, as for Lincoln, the survival of the Union meant above all the preservation of a regime devoted to the principles of the Founders. NSC-68 crystallized containment policy, uniting power with principle in a strategy that matched military means to political ends.

The article reviews the role of the Federal Constitutional Court in the shaping of educational policy in the Federal Republic of Germany. It identifies two related, but different, constitutional norms which the Court brings to bear upon its views of the relationship between education and the state: (a) the norm of “equal protection,” which has had a particularly precarious role in the German constitutional tradition as far as education was concerned; and (b) the norm of legitimacy as it relates to the decision-making processes through which educational policy objectives are set and the means for achieving them elaborated. The Court's efforts to make current practices in West German educational policy comply with these norms led the Court to develop its own notion of “legalization” in the twin principles of “statutorization” and “parliamentarization.” Against the background of this development, the article argues that the Court succeeds reasonably well in terms of satisfying the “equal protection” norm, but that it may have underestimated the seriousness and precari-ousness of the legitimacy issue.

In this article a widespread misperception of Aristotle's political thought is challenged, a misperception shared even by his champions among recent political theorists: that his concept of political community is derived from an image of organic growth and identity, and thus does not account for political conflict. Familiarity with liberal political thought and institutions has led most of Aristotle's contemporary interpreters to look for counterimages to liberal images of political society in his work. As a result, they tend to ignore or underplay the connections which Aristotle draws between political community and political conflict. By interpreting Aristotle's concepts of political community and political friendship in light of his analysis of political argument in Book 3 of the Politics, the article tries to uncover these connections and their implications.

Kant's political philosophy involves more than a deduction of a normative model of institutions from a set of normative premises. Certain empirical premises must be added to Kant's argument. In this paper the author argues that many of Kant's own empirical assumptions are doubtful if not false. A sketch is then made of a model of institutions that can be derived from Kantian normative principles together with more plausible empirical assumptions.

Political ideas today are different manifestations of a common paradigm which postulates a disenchanted universe allowing no middle ground between piecemeal social engineering and revolutionary transformation. We need a new definition of political order as opposed to disenchanted social control. Order consists of a harmony of autonomous parts while control is something imposed from outside. Control over a polity requires that the cosmos be stripped of symbols (disenchantment). Political order, by contrast, is always a reflection of cosmic order. If the universe is disenchanted, political power is arbitrary. There can be freedom only when control over the symbols of legitimacy is impossible.