Our nation's bicentennial year 1976 also marks the centennial of the death of Orestes A. Brownson (1803–1876). Throughout his life, Brownson was a lecturer and editor as well as a prolific writer on all aspects of nineteenth-century American life. His voluminous writings are of sweeping range. They include political treatises on American democracy, church-state relations, foreign policy, theological works, social commentaries on slavery, war and peace, the feminist movement, education, economic writings on the relationship between business and government, philosophical critiques of French, German, Italian and British philosophy, literary criticism and aesthetic evaluations of poetry and native American literature.

No Roman historian except the scholar propagandist Livy would have described his own age as the best of times and the worst of times. Imperial pagan Romans were too morally pessimistic about history to be able to say more than what Tacitus in effect said of the age of Trajan: it was the best of the worst times. His patriotism in no way encouraged him to say yes to his age, as Vergil and Livy had done to theirs. Instead it strengthened the moral severity with which he passed judgment on men of an iron age.

The study of the American Revolution probably loses something because we know how it came out, which may lead to creating interpretations unknown to the revolutionaries. Nevertheless, if we keep in mind the danger of finding omens to fit our prejudices, we may profit from a reappraisal aimed at better understanding.

In recent years the question of the feasibility and importance of participatory forms of government has been increasingly debated. Academicians, students, workers, poverty groups, party members, and environmental action groups have demanded greater participation in decision-making. They have concluded that civic involvement is the answer to what they characterize as the malaise of contemporary society: loss of governmental authority, feelings of powerlessness, overcentralization and bureaucratic manipulation, and inauthenticity.

This emphasis on participation is the dominant theme in Hannah Arendt's political philosophy. Arendt argues that a truly human life must have a public dimension to it. In many respects, though, her political thought in general, and her case for participation in particular, are distinctively different from others who also favor greater citizen involvement.

Every age seems to have some dominating central idea, and every particular political system surely has some dominating central idea from which radiate all the institutions, processes, and the texture of life in that country. As Tocqueville long ago said, the dominating idea of our age, and of our political order in particular, is the idea of equality. Equality is therefore at once for us the source of our political benefits and also the source of our defects and dangers. That is to say, every dominating idea is the one that determines for the society its likeliest and greatest benefits and dangers, because the central idea is the one that can do the greatest and most pervasive good and by the same token also the greatest harm. Equality is for us that central principle, the one we have to grapple with and wrest good from, and likewise the principle from which come our greatest dangers. Equality is the political problem for mankind in the present age.

When Crane Brinton published his Anatomy of Revolution in 1938, he noted in his bibliography fewer than thirty titles in English that dealt in general terms with revolution. Today a comprehensive listing would include some ten times that number of articles and books, and such proliferation seems likely to continue as scholars go on with their examination of revolution as a theoretical problem and in a number of theoretical and historical contexts. Like Brinton, most have taken a comparative approach, attempting to develop a conceptual framework capable of explaining the nature and the occurrence of all revolutionary movements. More recent studies, however, have moved in the direction of placing revolution in broader contexts.

In the beginning of his Politics Aristotle argues that “man is by nature a political animal.” In fact man is more a political animal than any herding animal, for “man alone of the animals has speech,” “man alone of the animals has reason,” “man alone of the animals has logos.” In other contexts the word logos can also be translated as word, account, argument, or ratio. Logos is connected with the verb legōo which means to speak and to gather, to pick out, to select, to count. The English words collect, select, and elect are related to the same verb. Logosis selected, elected, and chosen speech, meaningful speech, thoughtful speech. The traditional definition of man as the rational animal, stemming from Aristotle, goes back to this statement, that man alone of the animals possesses logos, possesses thoughtful speech. Aristotle goes on to say:

The assertion that we are living a moment in which a deep transformation of human relations will emerge is no longer commonplace dictum. Everybody talks of crisis, but not any longer in the purely economic sense of disturbances to the process involving production and consumption, but rather in the sense of general confusion and disarray, in the sense of uncertainty before measures taken unsuccessfully, which often provoke greater inconveniences than those to be remedied.

A topic like moral aspiration raises questions that no historian can long neglect if he deals with sovereign national entities such as the United States. One of the most challenging questions to be faced has to do with those mysterious bonds of affection and loyalty that provide whatever degree of psychic unity and collective aspirations a country may possess. In responding to a question about the religious dimension of national aspirations, however, I am tempted by the promise of a shortcut modeled on an argument that gained prominence among nineteenth-century Baptists belonging to the Landmark movement who, despite the absence of clear historical evidence, wished to establish the unbroken continuity of the Baptist succession from apostolic times to the present day.

When Dwight D. Eisenhower assumed the presidency in 1953, twenty years of Democratic rule ended, and many changes followed. These were most obvious on the personal side. Prominent figures of the New Deal and Fair Deal disappeared from the Washington scene, and new men, largely from the business world, took over. But on policy matters the changes were less abrupt. Eisenhower had pledged during the 1952 campaign not “to turn the clock back—ever.” And so there was no wholesale reversal of New Deal and Fair Deal policies. It is important to remember that Eisenhower accepted most of the social welfare legislation of the two preceding decades, although he disappointed Republican conservatives in doing so. Thus, in the 1950's, the New Deal largely was eliminated as an active political issue and became an accepted part of American history. It is doubtful whether any other Republican political figure could have achieved that change and could have made palatable to most of his fellow Republicans the social welfare legislation of the 1930's and 1940's.

Remorselessly, and apparently inevitably, as 1976 ticks away, the death toll in the tangled Irish Troubles creeps higher, faster this year than any time since 1972—the vintage year for blood and turmoil. Except for the threatened, no one any longer seems greatly to care. Murder must be peculiarly grisly or quite spectacular to warrant more than cursory coverage in any but Irish journals. The dramatic detonation of a mine under the British ambassador's Jaguar outside Dublin in July engendered, briefly, media interest. Ambassadors are not assassinated every day, but in Ulster ordinary people are—or nearly every day. There have been too many nowarning bombs in pubs to remember, too many sprawled bodies discovered by pedestrians to concern any but the devastated relatives. The Provisional IRA's self-imposed truce has eroded and again there are bombs in Belfast, land mines in South Armagh, snipers in Derry. The British army and especially the Ulster police have become prime targets. Yet the Republicans feud among themselves. The Loyalist paramilitaries still pursue a strategy of random assassination and thus have unleashed a vicious, seemingly irreversible, cycle of tit-for-tat murders. Politicians, warders, judges are targets of assassins of various faiths. And the violence has been exported. There are bombs in Manchester and Birmingham, assassins in Kensington and gunmen firing into restaurants in London's West End, explosions in the underground, firebombs in the shops. The Loyalist paramilitaries have carried their war into the Irish Republic with explosions in crowded streets. The elegant Gresham and Shelbourne hotels have been bombed in Dublin and lesser resort establishments hit elsewhere. The greatest single slaughter, twenty-six people killed, came in a Dublin street, not in Belfast or Derry. No one sees an end. Even the hope that mutual exhaustion might bring an end to violence has flickered out.

A neglected issue in the study of modernization is how the person transfers his pursuit of ultimate ends and meanings from religious to secular perspectives. If one could speak of a modern paradigm, it would include, at a minimum, commitments to rationalism and immanence. Unifying debates between classical rationalists and empiricists, Marxists and positivists, and idealists and realists, is the notion that some form of human reason is the court of last resort for disputes, whether reason be interpreted deductively, inductively, instrumentally, dialectically, or vitally; and the belief that ultimate meaning resides, if at all, in the public situation or in history. Modern perspectives demand, then, that the person confronts and overcomes in some way religious desires, such as the wills to immortality, plenitude, and eternal justice. Methods must be devised by which these desires are either channeled into political or historical perspectives, transferred from the public to the private realm, or denied altogether.

In Egypt, as in most developing countries, universities form part of the state system. The university is regarded as a government department. The Egyptian government not only appropriates money for higher education, but also controls the administrative structure of the universities and the higher institutes. Academic appointments as well as promotions and dismissals are in the hands of state officials. This kind of relationship dates back to 1925, when the Egyptian government “nationalized” and created what is now the University of Cairo. This development is closely related to the rise of Egyptian nationalism and the efforts of Egyptian leaders to achieve independence from British rule. Right from the beginning, the university was therefore conceived as an important instrument for the realization of national (political) goals.

It is a policy of Hobbes' polemic to state the crucial point or principle in the boldest form before embarking on qualifications. In just this spirit he asserts that men are equal by nature. Fifty variations among men in what is ordinarily considered to differentiate significantly—mental or physical powers—become unimportant for the matter at hand: politics. Thus, with a swift and elegant force, Hobbes turns the reader's mind away from the tradition of Aristotle's Politics wherein the mental powers among men are different to the extent of dividing mankind into those who are capable of participating in government and those, the natural slaves, whose lack of deliberative capacity condemns them to a servile, nondeliberative existence within the state.

In the preface to his doctoral dissertation Marx wrote: “Philosophy makes no secret of it. The proclamation of Prometheus, 'in a word I detest all the Gods,' is her own profession, her own slogan against all the gods of heaven and earth who do not recognize man's self-consciousness as the highest divinity. There shall be none other beside it.” Now this attitude of defying God goes hand in hand with an attitude toward the world: one who cannot endure the idea of God's sovereignty often resents even the “givenness” of things with specific natures. It is not just that he senses that they would lead him back to God, but also that they, each with its own inner logos which imposes itself on man, are themselves felt to belong to the detested gods. Such a man approaches these things to destroy their givenness, and to make new objects out of them which reflect himself and his powers, and depend on him. The Austrian art historian, Hans Sedlmayr, describes this attitude as follows:

Dem Menschen, der sich ganz autonom proklamiert, muss es unertraeglich sein, Kreaturen zu begegnen, die offenbar nicht seine Geschoepfe sind. Es ist ein prometheischer und im Grund narzistischer Traum, sich durch Technik und naturfreie Kunst eine menschliche Umwelt zu bauen, in der man nichts und niemandem begegnet als den Schoepfungen des eigensten Menschengestes.

God created Americans much like other people. But in the beginning all was good. America, being entirely new (at least to the white race), was especially good. Somehow Americans, simply because they were here and no longer there, considered themselves good people. They regarded themselves as being virtuous in the group because it, if not everyone in it, represented a new start for the weary sin-laden human race. The first moral aspiration of the Puritans was to be Israel reconstituted, a kingdom that rested on a covenant with God, its capital the holy city on the hill.

In his analysis of Plato's Republic, Aristotle objects to his teacher's abstract and psychological method by suggesting that “there is another matter which must not be ignored—the teaching of actual experience. We are bound to pay some regard to the long past and the passage of the years, in which these things…would not have gone unnoticed if they had been really good.” Ever since that time, political theorists have been divided on the question of the appropriate approach to the study of politics, and often, as in the case of Plato and Aristotle, the focal point of the disagreement has been whether politics is best seen through the lens of history or the study of human nature and the development of a consequent psychology. This, for example, is the crux of the argument between James Mill and T. B. Macaulay. Mill is the proponent of a psychological approach; he maintains “it is immediately obvious that a wide and difficult field is presented, and that the whole science of human nature must be explored to lay a foundation for the science of government.” Macaulay disagrees, for he believes that “the style which the Utilitarians admire, suits only those subjects on which it is possible to reason a priori.” Indeed, in Macaulay's view, Mill belongs in the Middle Ages: “of those schoolmen Mr. Mill has inherited both the spirit and the style. He is an Aristotelian of the fifteenth century, born out of due season.” Far better, continues Macaulay, is the inductive historical method which observes the world, examines facts, devotes itself to the careful study of the past, and checks itself “by perpetually bringing the theory which we have constructed to the test of new facts….”

In the development of American liberal thought in the twentieth century Reinhold Niebuhr occupies a central, but only partially examined, place. Numerous writers have noted that his active forty-year career followed a pattern typical of many other American intellectuals in the middle third of the century. From a rejection of liberalism and an attachment to Marxism in the thirties, he emerged in the postwar period with a renascent liberal faith, which in the fifties assumed an increasingly rigid, anticommunist cast.

Just a few years ago, it was estimated that 90 percent of all the scientists and engineers who had ever lived were still alive; and that more than half of them were resident in the United States. These numbers show the status of America as a major scientific nation, and the reason why this is a fact of critical importance for the historical analyst in 1976 is that only 40 years ago America could probably still be classed as an “undeveloped” (or “developing”) country on the highest scale of the international scientific community. Before addressing myself to the causes of this change and its consequences for American political and social thought and action, for the American conscience and for America's public image and self-image, let me indicate the kind of evidence that supports my assertion that America might be considered “underdeveloped” with respect to the sciences, prior to 1935. First of all, there was an almost wholly one-way direction of movement of graduate and postdoctoral students: eastward over the Atlantic to the great European centers of scientific teaching and research. Although there were some fields in which Americans had been making outstanding contributions, such as experimental and theoretical genetics, by and large the great overarching theories that either introduced order into one of the sciences, or brought diverse branches of science into an unexpected relationship, or revolutionized much of science, were produced by Europeans: Rutherford, the Curies, Einstein, Bohr, Pauli, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Dirac. In 1963, in an address on the occasion of the centenary celebrations of our National Academy of Sciences, John F. Kennedy observed that of the 670 members of the Academy, 163 (or one out of every four) had been born in foreign lands—a figure that differed in order of magnitude from the condition in any other country, and that showed the degree to which the high estate that American science had gained was owing to the infusion of scientists from abroad.

Why should Plato's philosopher rule? A deceptively simple question, and one that many would contend Plato answered in a straightforward way in the Republic: because justice requires it and the philosopher is just (520a, 520e). Yet, if justice is defined as psychic harmony (443c-444a) and psychic harmony is eudaimonia, and if pure philosophizing makes the philosopher most eudaimon (as several texts indicate) it would seem that descent from the philosophic heights to rule is unjust. Glaucon makes this objection (519d) and Aristotle, dissatisfied with Plato's reply, repeats it. The charge implicit here and in many recent commentators is that Plato provides no satisfying philosophical account of the relation between justice (dikaiosune) and happiness (eudaimonia) and thus no philosophic justification for ruling. For Glaucon and Adeimantus ask that Socrates show that justice-—by which they mean “fair-dealing to others,” the restraint from pleonexia in sociopolitical affairs—makes the just man happy of itself apart from reputation or external reward. Socrates' reply identifies justice and psychic harmony, calling the latter “real” or inner justice. But this is only a relevant reply if some necessary connection can be shown between psychic harmony and justice in the ordinary, sociopolitical sense. Is it necessarily the case that the psychically harmonious or happy man deals fairly with others? For if justice is defined as psychic harmony (well-being or happiness) then the philosopher is most happy philosophizing, and his refusal to rule is not only justified, but justified by Socrates' own argument. The potential embarrassmentthen is that the philosopher in the Republic—the only individual skilled in justification by argument or dialectic—may be incapable of fulfilling the request of Glaucon and Adeimantus. His own unwillingness to rule seems to indicate he doesn't believe in the connection between justice and happiness. Moreover, if the philosopher's dialectical inquiries into the relation between (ordinary) justice and happiness end in failure, then Socrates in fact undermines belief in justice while trying to defend it. If then, as some have claimed,4 the Republic is the true apology of Socrates and of philosophy to the polis, it is surely a disastrous one.