It was in 1948 that Pierre Cot called for French neutrality in the rapidly developing tension between the communist and non-communist power blocs. But after all Cot, an influential prewar figure of the Radical Party's left wing and Air Minister of the Popular Front Government, had emerged from the war as a staunch communist sympathizer and a leader of the pro-communist Union Progressiste. Consequently, his opposition to the policy of a West European defense coalition — the Brussels Pact — hardly seemed surprising. Outside the sphere of direct communist influence, however, few important voices in France opposed the formation of a West European defense system.

Until more or less recently, few students of international affairs have been preoccupied with the theoretical aspects of their field. To the extent that theory is distinguished from history, law and science, this is especially true. Historians have sought to uncover the facts and recite them with the most fastidious regard for the circumstances of time and place. Lawyers have tried to detect in the case law of international agreements and treaties the normative structure of international society. Political scientists have increasingly turned to new scientific methods and statistical techniques designed to measure public opinion and its influence on foreign policy. Few scholars have concerned themselves with the fundamental characteristics of international society or of good or bad foreign policy. In this intellectual environment any explicit, systematic theory of international relations has had to await a threefold development. It has required a broader conception of the proper methods for studying international affairs, a clearer identification of basic concepts and “laws,” and a more serious discussion of fundamental theoretical problems like the relation of theory to concrete problems.

In plato's Theaetetus Socrates develops the character of the philosopher, the man of knowledge, in contrast to the atheoretical, practical man.* He endeavors to demonstrate the distinctive qualities of the philosopher by emphasizing his peculiar attitude towards the political sphere.

First, the philosopher has no political ambitions, and he does not care about what is going on in the political sphere.

When the attack on Pearl Harbor plunged the United States into its second world war, the immediate concern of political leaders and public opinion alike was to train its manpower and to mobilize its industrial resources as the fisrst step in the long up-hill climb from initial defeat to decisive victory, first against Germany, then against Japan. Its prime political aim was to forge and maintain an effective working alliance with its major allies, Britain and the Soviet Union. If either faltered or failed in the joint effort, the road to victory and postwar security would stretch out beyond the horizon. After almost two decades of selfimposed isolation, American power was now to be concerned intimately with decisions, taken or not taken, which would in turn affect all parts of the world. Neither possessing the British tradition of continuity in its diplomacy nor possessed by the ruthless Soviet drive for expansion, impsrovised American policy-making toward many areas, including East Central Europe, sometimes mistook sympathy for policy, hope for action.

The Science, or as others prefer to call it, the study of international relations is one of the youngest members of the family of the social sciences. Its independent status has not yet been fully recognized by all academic circles and many historians and international lawyers would consider it to be trespassing on their respective fields of study. This is especially true for Europe.

In the progressive alienation of the modern world from Christianity and the Church, in what is described as intellectual secularization, the publicist plays a decisive role.* The mere mention of the name of Voltaire suggests what the significance of anti-Church publicist work may be. In the name of reason it appeals against the superstition of religion, in the name of justice it covers with contempt and ridicule the claims of tradition, it directs its attacks against existing institutions, and it contrasts the light of secular philosophy to the darkness of Church dogma. All that is done in a facile, universally understandable way. The enlightened publicist does not seek to make an impression on the learned. He does not try to astonish by the fullness of his knowledge. He tries to draw the public opinion of good society to his side and to gain it for his cause. With such assurance does he proceed that he seems to achieve his goal. An educated man who has been shaped by eighteenth century France cares to hear nothing more about the Church as a divine institution. Enlightenment and public opinion became the same thing. Public opinion simply coincided with what the Enlightened publicist prescribed for it. Indeed, it was already apparent in the eighteenth century that it is not a simple thing to decide what corresponds to reason, justice, and untutored human nature. In the name of a sentimental inner religion Rousseau fought against the negative Enlightenment of the Encyclopedists, the circle of Voltaire and Diderot. But this struggle changed nothing in the general situation. Public opinion remained decisive. It was selfevidently opposed to tradition generally and, thus, also to the Church. If the reader of Voltaire jeered and ridiculed religion, the reader of Rousseau shed tears over the Savoyard Vicar, who, in metamorphosing Church dogma into a religion of feeling and humanity, thus deprived religion of its substance. Both would hear nothing of that fosterer of superstition and that oppresser of knowledge, that Church against which they had set themselves up as priests of public opinion, as publicists.

During the years 1939–45, a spectacular change occurred in the anti-religious policy of the Soviet government. The pattern of direct persecution was discarded and replaced by a more subtle pattern of ostentatious compromise in combination with indirect pressure. The compromise was publicly demonstrated at the meeting of the National Council of the Russian Orthodox Church (January-February 1945) convoked, by permission of the Soviet government, to elect a new Patriarch in place of the deceased Sergius. The Council was attended by a number of high dignitaries of the non-Russian Orthodox Churches; many of them were flown to the Council in Soviet bombers. At the end of the Council, a gala reception was organized for its members by G. Karpov, the chairman of the Council for the Affairs of the Orthodox Church; during that reception two choirs could be heard, the Patriarch's choir and the Moscow Philharmonic choir sponsored by the Soviet government. The enthroning of the new Patriarch Alexei was filmed and the film displayed in all the movie theaters of the Union.

Less than a year after Senator Taft died, a foundation was established for the preservation of his ideals. Men's ideals are sometimes confused with their ideas, as is probably the case in this instance, because it is often difficult to distinguish between them. This paper is concerned with both. More specifically, it is concerned with the ideas Senator Taft propagated about foreign policy and the ideals that fostered them.

Not long ago—early in 1954—the world observed a debate at Berlin between diplomats of East and West who offered their alternatives for solving the German problem. The Soviet solution as set forth by Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister, was to use Germans as pawns in a diplomatic maneuver whose object was clearly to wreck Western European integration and to strengthen the Soviet Union. The solution proposed by the Western diplomats, John Foster Dulles, Anthony Eden and George Bidault, was to regard Germans as equals with whom they would negotiate a solution to Germany's problems. The Soviets have used the satellite East German regime to parrot their program and they have groomed it to neutralize Germany or lead it into the Communist camp. The Western diplomats have concluded that in order to obtain a lasting German settlement there must be free elections to establish an all-German government, which would be competent to negotiate about Germany's future and would be free to join the Western Alliance, if it chose to do so.

Two ancient symbols—public opinion and the middle class— have nearly always been associated in some degree. Public opinion has stood, first of all, for participation in the government of a society. Such participation has raised the issue of the quality of opinion or the quality of the participation in the government of res populi. From the time of the Greeks at least, the middle class has been regarded by certain conservatives, or let us say, Aristotelians, as having moderate, intelligent, and balanced opinion.

Though public opinion and the middle class idea have been often associated, they have each had different and divergent lines of emergence; different theoretical problems have been presented, and some of this development is to be outlined here. Yet at the tense moments of the eighteenth-century revolution, the French Revolution and its children, they were joined together in close doctrinal union at the height of an historical crisis.

Waldemar Gurian was a presence—physically, intellectually and spiritually—at Notre Dame. In the many years he was with us, a daily wonder of the campus was the sight of Dr. Gurian ponderously proceeding from his office to the library to the post office to the dining halls and back again, bearing with him as he passed—so it seemed to a number of us—all the light of the world as well as a large part of its darkness. He came to Notre Dame during a period—the middle and later thirties—when President O'Hara (now Archbishop of Philadelphia) was inviting to the university as visiting or regular faculty members a variety of scholars and writers from England, Ireland and the Continent: among others, Shane Leslie, Arnold Lunn, Christopher Hollis, Archbishop David Mathew, Robert Speaight, Desmond Fitzgerald, Charles Du Bos, Yves Simon, Karl Menger and Arthur Haas. Of all these Dr. Gurian, who was on friendly terms with most of them, remained; and his impact upon the life of the university has been the greatest and the most enduring. Among his achievements here, The Review of Politics is undoubtedly his most lasting. When he arrived at Notre Dame, a proper intellectual climate, created by not a few teachers and priests, existed, a climate which made possible the founding, the sustenance and the continuance of a broad cultural journal like the Review. Professors of philosophy, literature and history as well as of political philosophy and science—interested in generating what Professor Nef calls “the new scholarship of synthesis”—could understand the reasons for and the necessity of the Review's coming into existence at Notre Dame; and could and did cooperate in its founding, in its formation and in its growth to eminence. But the great and active form was provided by Waldemar Gurian. And the Review surely stands today as the embodiment of his genius and knowledge and immensity of spirit.

“I am not a politician, and my other habits are good.” This statement appeared almost twenty years ago in a serious book about The American Political Scene, and it reflects a widespread opinion in the United States today. The term “politician” widely connotes evil, corruption, and crass self-aggrandisement at public expense. Politics is frequently looked upon as a disreputable profession; and political history is often considered dull, meaningless, and insignificant, especially when compared with economic history, intellectual history, or that unpredictable mosaic called social history. This state of things appears curious in view of these facts: that government plays a larger role in our lives than ever before and that politics is the process by means of which governmental policies are formulated. Indeed, it might well be argued that it is a regrettable and even an indefensible state of things if, as seems likely, “big government” is here to stay.

An orderly and almost bloodless movement brought Guatemala independence from Spain in 1821. The tranquil inception of national existence contrasts vividly with the ensuing century and a quarter, a period marked by turbulence and a multitude of factors tending to retard political and economic development. The 1821 Revolution resulted only in the overthrow of Spanish rule; other traditions of colonial times were not so easily cast aside. Politics continued to be the exclusive domain of long-term, personalistic rulers, while economic policy remained under the control of a numerically small land-owning aristocracy. The political chiefs generally allied themselves with the conservative lords of land. Certainly this was true of Rafael Carrera, the uneducated mestizo who dominated the country for nearly twenty years in the mid-nineteenth century. The same pattern existed during the dictatorship of Manuel Estrada Cabrera, 1898–1920. In spite of a few concessions to liberalism, the construction of many roads, and the redistribution of a small amount of land, there is no doubt that the rule of Jorge Ubico, 1930–1944, relied for its main support upon the arch-conservative landed aristocrats.

The body of the Federalists [even] were always, and yet are, essentially democratic in their political notions … willing to hazard the experiment of an … almost unqualified proportion of democracy…. The Federal Constitution was as good, or very nearly as good, as our country could bear; … Our materials for government were all democratic; and whatever the hazard of their combination may be, our Solons and Lycurgeses in the convention had no alternative, nothing to consider, but how to combine them…. We should have succeeded worse if we had trusted our metaphysics more. Experience must be our physician, though his medicines may kill.

During the past fourteen years, since the entry of the United States into the Second World War, and especially since the end of the war (with its disillusioning peace blending into the so-called cold war), the United States has had thrust upon it the problems of the overwhelming difficulties of world leadership. Leadership in the true sense of the word cannot be totalitarian or authoritarian. It must be intellectual, moral and spiritual. This our leading statesmen have sometimes recognized, though not, I am inclined to think, often enough. In any event, it is in these spheres that our peoples have been perhaps the least prepared for our mission. Even in the natural sciences, one of the principal creative sources of American leadership has been individual scientists—such as Einstein, Fermi and Teller—bom and trained in Europe, who found asylum in the United States from Nazi or Fascist tyranny. In so far as the creative mind and its place in the national life are concerned, our main weakness has not been, however, in the natural sciences. During the first half of the twentieth century in the United States these have become distinguished in their own right. When it comes to the practical application of science we have led the world. In no other country have the results of new scientific knowledge been utilized technologically to produce as high a standard of living, measured in material quantity, as in the United States.

In the intellectual history of Russia, Konstantin Leontiev (1831–1891) emerges as a singular and enigmatic figure. Generous and benevolent in his personal relations and a scintillating conversationalist, he encountered antagonism or indifference where his writings and theories were concerned. The extremely unique and even esoteric quality of his thought caused him to exert virtually no influence either in his own day or in more recent periods. He was not a representative member of the Russian intelligentsia; indeed, he beggars assignment to any particular school. Perhaps the best description one can make of him is that of heir to the emotional strain of German philosophical romanticism. His predilection for naturalism and aestheticism are typical of early nineteenth century German anti-rationalist philosophy, as is his emphasis on tradition and organic development. Leontiev lacked utterly the humanistic qualities of the earlier Slavophiles who first appropriated German philosophic influence, and this quality of severity divorces him from the Russian romantic tradition. At the same time, his idealism caused him to be wholly out of tune with the nihilist, revolutionary, and populist tendencies of his own day. A prophet without honour, he was not without merit; his views are most provocative and reward attention. Not the least interesting aspect of Leontiev lies in his attitude towards nationalism; and it is with this facet of his thought that we shall be concerned.

Of all the liberal arts no two would appear to be more closely and naturally interrelated than literature and history. Doubtless one can enjoy and appreciate much in belles-lettres even though handicapped by a limited knowledge of history, but the serious study of any body of literature would generally be admitted to presuppose a reasonable mastery of the historical milieu. In some instances, even a superficial understanding of a literary work would be impossible without the ability to place it in proper historical context. That literature is closely akin to history can be vouched for by the many who have been exposed to literature courses in college wherein the “background” seemed to outweigh in importance the creative achievements under study.

Man has to live by values, a fact brought out with a sort of dogged repetition by Tolstoi. To live is to value, no matter what else it may be. So Tolstoi rightly claimed, and he also said that to live as man is to rate things up and down, as good and as evil. It is to know, and to use a measuring rod which we often call a norm or standard. Tolstoi said that we do not know at all what life would be like without this constant valuing and rating of acts and things. If that is so, man is the more or less consciously valuing animal, and the materials for a philosophy of value are at least as old as mankind, though this philosophy becomes evident only in men such as Plato and Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas and Kant.

He was a man of many friends and a friend to all of them, men and women, priests and laymen, people in many countries and from practically all walks of life. Friendship was what made him at home in this world and he felt at home wherever his friends were, regardless of country, language or social background. Knowing how sick he was, he made his last trip to Europe because, as he said, “I want to say farewell to my friends before I die.” He did the same when he came back and stayed a few days in New York, did it consciously and almost systematically, without a trace of fear or self-pity or sentimentality. He who throughout his life had never been able to express personal feeling without the greatest embarrassment could do this in a kind of impersonal manner, without feeling, and therefore without causing, embarrassment. Death must have been very familiar to him.