Karl barth has for so long been a star of the first magnitude in the firmament of religious thought that his visit to America had something of the spectacularity of an unprecedented approach of a heavenly body. But when he took his seat in the chancel of the Rockefeller Chapel at Chicago University, and peered curiously at the 2400 people gathered to hear him; when he grinned puckishly while the chairman asked no one to disturb him with flashbulbs, he betrayed a kind of oldshoe homeliness that promptly transferred him from the celestial realm to the company of one's country cousins.

The seizure of the government by Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat in September, 1957, was more than the assumption of political power by another military leader in Thailand, and the overthrow of the former regime headed by Field Marshal Phibun Songkhram marked a definite turning point in the evolution of the Thai political system. After experimenting with constitutional democracy for almost twenty-five years, Thailand turned to a new form of political rule. The purpose of this article is to survey briefly the development of the Thai political system since the beginning of the constitutional regime in June, 1932, and to assess the present trend of the Sarit government in a country where military officers have long played a pre-eminent role in the political life of the nation.

AtAbout the time I received my first faculty assignment at Swarthmore College, an obituary notice of an old and admired professor made a deep impression on me. The subject was L. T. Hobhouse, the distinguished English sociologist and lifelong liberal. He had been one of the intellectual pillars upon which the Webbs and a few others had constructed the London School of Economics. I did not know Hobhouse well. But his obituary notice was written by a man I much admired, who was in a way my intellectual father: R. H. Tawney. You perhaps know him as the author of Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, but he was much better known then as a moral force in the British Labour party. To some of its members Tawney's Acquisitive Society, first published in 1921, seemed to offer a fresh charter of liberty, giving a kind of spiritual sanction, missing in Marxian philosophy, to the struggle to overcome misery and poverty with the help of political action.

The appraisal of national conventions as mechanisms for nominating presidents involves many problems of political theory. Who should be entrusted with the task of nomination? Can we reconcile the desirability of popular participation with the need for maintaining a strong party leadership? To what extent does the nominating convention contribute to the maintenance of the political system in which it is imbedded? Does the apparent lack of decorum in this high political body adversely affect the kinds of decisions it makes? What are the implications of increasing the visibility of convention nominations? Any attempt to deal with these and similar questions necessarily involves an admixture of normative and descriptive theory. Postulation of what ought to be can hardly be separated from consideration of the actual or likely consequences of alternative courses of action. The merits of existing party platforms, for example, cannot be fruitfully discussed apart from knowledge of the relevance of issues to voters. In this context, I propose to evaluate national conventions and the various proposals for altering or abolishing them in the light of the degree to which they meet widely shared goals for the American political system.

Hegel was a resident of Jena when the Battle of Jena, a shattering defeat for Prussia, took place. On October 13, 1806, the day on which the French entered the town and deployed for the engagement fought the next day, Hegel wrote to his friend Niethammer:

As I wrote to you earlier, all of us here wish the French victory and success. The Prussians are suffering the defeats they deserve… This morning I saw the Emperor Napoleon, that World Soul (diese Weltseele), riding through the town to a parade. It's a marvelous feeling to see such a personality dominating the entire world from horseback … He is capable of doing anything. How wonderful he is!

Three months later, in a letter to another friend, Zelmann, Hegel summed up the historical lesson of the Battle of Jena: “There is no better proof than the events occurring before our eyes, that culture is triumphing over barbarism and the intellect over spirit-less mind.”

Notwithstanding the manifold activities of the Soviet Government in world affairs since Nikita Khrushchev took over the heritage of Stalin, there is still a wide-spread lack of understanding in the non-communist world of the international aims and policies of Stalin's successor. This situation islargely due to the image of Khrushchev's goals and policies which communist propaganda has built up throughout the world — an image which is a pretty complete misrepresentation of the reality. A very effective role in this propaganda has been played by the term, policy of peaceful coexistence, which Khrushchev has chosen to describe his new course. The selection of this term was a master strokeon the part of the communist leader in view of the great success which this slogan has had in blurringand confusing the thinking of Western writers and commentators on Soviet foreign policy.

The greatly increased interest in Orestes A. Brownson will probably restore him to his real importance in the history of Catholicism in the United States. Classifying him as a philosopher has caused him to be seriously neglected, because Catholic philosophers in the United States, since the revival of the philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas, have been very contemptuous of American philosophers. As a matter of fact, in his own day, before the Thomist revival, his ontologism bewildered even his admirers. Significantly, Brownson did not call himself a “philosopher” but a “publicist” — a very much neglected title in the United States.

This study traces the development during World War II of official American attitudes toward Palestine. Utilizing recently released official papers of President Franklin D. Roosevelt at Hyde Park, New York, and documentation in the Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem, our goal is to describe early American efforts to accommodate policy to the complexities of Middle Eastern politics. While relevant documents are still unavailable, the diplomatic and domestic politics chronicled here may provide better perspective than has hitherto been possible.

Unlike the laws enacted against religious and political dissenters in almost every European state since the Reformation, the Popery legislation enacted by the Irish Parliaments of William III, Anne, and the first two Hanoverians was marked by a near absence of sanguinary punishments. The long period of enforcement, one hundred years, and the areas of human activity regulated distinguish the Irish laws from twentieth-century commitments to ideals of ideological uniformity. Not only were the Irish Popery laws unique in these respects, but they comprised one of the most persistent legislative efforts ever undertaken by a western European state to change a people. Although the Popery laws have been discussed and analyzed since their enactment, such discussions have usually been colored by confessional and political partisanship. Neither polemicists nor serious historians have satisfactorily analyzed either the purpose of the laws or the problems and consequences of enforcing them. While these matters are the principal concern of this article, the writer hopes that his necessarily limited investigation of the Irish Popery laws will invite the attention of social scientists to the other complex human problems created by this legislation.

InThePreface to her account of her father's formative years Clara Misch Dilthey wrote, “My father often told me that everything that he had produced was nothing but the execution of thoughts and projects conceived in his youth.” Unlike Dilthey, Tocqueville did not have a child to whom he could confide the story of his intellectual life. Yet, if Tocqueville had had such a daughter, he might have made the same profession of indebtedness to the germinal ideas of his youth.

The agreement between British Foreign Minister Sir Samuel Hoare and Pierre Laval, French Premier and Foreign Minister, in early December, 1935, was a major turning point in European international politics during the interwar period. It placed a premium on Fascist aggression in Ethiopia by proposing that Italy be given actual or de facto control over huge slices of the African country. Several volumes of memoirs published in the last few years throw new light on some aspects of the proposal itself and on the politics of Great Britain, Italy, and France toward the Italo-Ethiopian conflict, policies which at the height of the international crisis produced the Hoare-Laval Plan. In addition, the State Department documents, published and unpublished, are a mine of information on these matters.

With all the volumes that have been written about Marx and Marxism in recent years, there has beenlittle or no attempt, in the English-speaking world at least, to relate his thinking to the general development of modern European philosophic speculation. Fundamentally this is because Marx has received short shrift as a philosopher. Both English and American commentators have been almost entirely concerned with his role as “social scientist” and polemicist, and hence have concentrated their attention upon his historical materialism and his critique of capitalist society.

ItIs one of the ironies of English literary history that World War I, the first great modern war, coincided with what C. Day Lewis calls ‘a period of very low vitality’ for poetry. There were no Edwardian or Georgian figures to match the stature of Tennyson or Browning; the main tendencies of the age were visible not in the genius of one or two master spokesmen but in the talents of a host of minor poets. These poets, reacting to the disintegration of nineteenth-century values and conventions, turned from the contemporary reality to the peace and certainty afforded by the mellow beauties of the English countryside. In the words of their most gifted representative, Rupert Brooke, the Georgians sought ‘to forget/The lies, the truths, and pain …’; poetry became a shelter, an escape, an anodyne, a nostalgic daydream. The first Georgian Poetry anthology (1912), as Vivian de Sola Pinto remarks, ‘is a strange collection to represent English poetry at the moment when Europe was preparing for the First World War and England's stability was being rocked by the constitutional crisis and the impending disruption of the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland.’ The characteristic qualities of Georgian poetry — its blandness, its decorum, its homogeneity, its simplicity of attitude — all reflect the decline of a once powerful imaginative vision. Lyric poetry had become a mere exercise of sensibility related neither to the modern reality nor to any intellectual or imaginative vision capable of assimilating it.

It is a commonplace of personal and social experience that, having once secured the conditions of human survival and temporal well-being, men have always turned their curiosities to the hows and whys of the universe and themselves in it. Generally, the results of such investigations have found expression in behavioral and systematic patterns formulated in their speculative learnings and assimilated into the language and culture of their times. These learnings and cultures, no less than the universe and societies of which they are the meaningful expressions, are the products of concrete and unique historical processes. To ignore this essentially historical condition of the emergence and development of human learnings and cultures is to risk sacrificing that all-important criterion by which any subsequent age is able to discern and assimilate the definitive achievements of every prior age and thus avoid the extreme alternatives of wholly accepting or wholly rejecting all of the achievements of any given age. To effect this discernment between the tentative and the definitive in the recorded results of our civilized past would seem, therefore, to require some broad yet genuine appreciation of the variables and the constants, the discontinuities and continuities in the past. It is to contribute something to the large task of that discernment that this analysis addresses itself.

The patriotism of the French underwent a far-reaching reorientation between 1871 and 1940. Understood as the readiness to do one's best for one's country, if necessary by fighting for it, the most significant change that affected French patriotic feeling during this period is its shift from the political left to the right. Popular response to the republican call to arms after the fall of the Empire in 1870 was to know no future parallel in its magnitude and enthusiasm. Excluded from positions of political prominence, the working classes and their leaders soon came to think that if they had a patrie, it was not the Third Republic. On the other hand, the right after a century of forgetfulness, rediscovered the old patriotic slogans as the left discarded them. And it used them with considerable skill to its political advantage. But the difference between left- and right-wing patriotism is that defeat in 1870 brought to power a man determined to fight against heavy odds, Gambetta; while defeat in 1940 brought to power a man determined to capitulate before the enemy, Pétain. And yet it has to be recognized that the origins of this transformation are to be found in the policies of the same Gambetta who, no doubt deservedly, is commonly hailed as the Jacobin hero of French resistance in 1870–1.

On october 5, 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt aroused the democratic world by calling for a quarantine of the aggressor nations. Since that morning in Chicago there has always been uncertainty as to how the President meant to implement his speech. A review of the available documents concerning the aftermath of the quarantine speech provides four additional notes which help clear up this uncertainty. The first demonstrates that Roosevelt instead of backing down before seemingly overwhelming opposition from the American public, believed he could persuade not only his fellow countrymen but “90 percent of the population of the world” to quarantine the aggressor nations. The second shows that the President looked upon the Nine Power Conference which met in Brussels during November, 1937, as an opportunity to initiate positive action in the Far East. The third, by an analysis of the activities of Norman Davis, the American delegate to that conference, indicates the extent to which the President was willing to go in imposing a quarantine against Japan. The last note attempts to explain briefly why by mid November Roosevelt finally “pulled in his horns” and permitted the Nine Power Conference to disintegrate. From these notes comes further support for the conclusions that the man who met defeat at Brussels was President Roosevelt and the policy which failed to be adopted was that of a quarantine, of containment, of the aggressor nations.

When historians come to assess the Eisenhower era they will ponder the fact that for the first time in American history a popular president was faced with an opposition Congress for six out of his eight years in office. Unquestionably, they will attribute part of this phenomenon to the fact that the President was stronger than his party. But they will also have to contend with the lack of divisive issues on Capitol Hill. This juxtaposition which has persisted so long dates from the G.O.P. revival of the later 1930's. This resurgence in turn brought about an alliance between Northern Republicans and Southern Democrats which explains so much about recent American politics. It is the purpose of the present study to investigate the causes of the Republican upsurge which once more made the Party a force of respectable opposition and laid the groundwork for its restoration to full power in 1952.

The Democratic Party platform adopted in Los Angeles, July 1960 promised:

To the non-Communist nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America: We shall create with you working partnerships, based on mutual respect and understanding.

In the Jeffersonian Tradition, we recognize and welcome the irresistible momentum of the world revolution of rising expectations for a better life. We shall identify American policy with its values and objectives.

To this end the new Democratic administration will revamp and refocus the objectives, emphasis, and allocation of our foreign assistance programs.

The proper purpose of these programs is not to buy gratitude or to recruit mercenaries, but to enable the peoples of these awakening, developing nations to make their own free choices.

As they achieve a sense of belonging, of dignity, and of justice, freedom will become meaningful for them, and therefore worth defending.

Where military assistance remains essential for the common defense, we shall see that the requirements are fully met. But as rapidly as security considerations permit, we will replace tanks with tractors, bombers with bulldozers, and tacticians with technicians.

Political theory never stands by itself. Any theoretical explanation of politics depends on attitudes and positions which stem from metaphysics, theology, ethics, or science. An understanding of the political thought of a man, then, will require some insight into the relationship between his politics and the presuppositions on which it is based. To write about the political theory of Descartes, however, presents special difficulties, for Descartes cannot be considered an important political thinker in his own right. His actual references to politics are scant. His influence on later thinkers did not arise from his thought about politics. Nevertheless, in political theory Descartes must be considered, for it was Descartes who set the patterns of speculative thought after him, including thought about politics. After Descartes the scientific and mechanical orientations of thought replaced the traditional Christian and Aristotelian molds in which politics had been considered.

The visit to the Vatican made by Kaiser William II on October 12, 1888, remains a memorable and somewhat curious event in the pontificate of Leo XIII. One version of this meeting has been given by Count Eduardo Soderini, a personal friend of Leo XIII, who thus far has been the only historian given access to the Vatican archives for this period. But the private papers of the pope's protégé and advisor, Cardinal Galimberti, particularly letters from the cardinal's German friend and informant, Monsignor Montel, suggest that Soderini's account is rather reticent and incomplete. This impression is confirmed by some documents in the papers of Friedrich von Holstein, a key figure in the German Foreign Ministry. A full account of this extraordinary meeting and a better appreciation of its significance is obtainable from unpublished documents in the French, German, and Austrian diplomatic archives, especially from a report made to Prince Bismarck by his son Herbert, a report approved and dictated in part by the kaiser himself.