The problem of violence in American culture has been a subject of increasing concern during the past two decades. In the fifties, there was rampant the school of “consensus” history writing, which tended to deny the existence of conflicts about basic issues in American history. More recently, the past has been portrayed in an entirely different light: Conflict, and particularly violent conflict, are seen as having been virtually endemic. Against the background of violent crime and civil disturbance, several presidential commissions have investigated violence, and they usually emerge with the conclusion that Americans are a peculiarly violent people. The atrocities of the Vietnam war, and police and ghetto violence, have led many to wonder at the same time whether the alleged merits of the American political system are as great as its defenders have insisted.

Is there a “peace movement”? It would appear so, if for no other reason than that a great many people count themselves part of “the movement,” as it is customarily called. Yet the independent researcher will be hard pressed to find any single unifying factor besides opposition to the Vietnam war. Even opposition to war generally or to similar forms of violence is not uniformly shared. Many have no objection to “just” wars or to the use of violence, e.g., revolution, to gain desired social reform. As the Vietnam war winds down, the movement is slowly being faced with the inevitable problem of maintaining some semblance of cohesion and unity.

The words are those of Mr. Nixon and Mr. Kissinger as they confront North Vietnam. Does North Vietnam resist our will? We will bomb their missiles, their trails and bases. Do they attack again? Do they punish the South Vietnamese? Interfere with our plan to win victory while withdrawing? We will do such things. …

Yet we know not what they are. Our bombers make cautionary raids across the border. We feint with naval forces along the North Vietnamese coast. We avow to the North that we will no longer be bound by the conventions of the past. We make vague threats of invasion, deny them, disclaim the denials. Our officials call attention to President Eisenhower's warning, twenty years ago, that he might use nuclear weapons in Korea; then we deny that we would use such weapons—in foreseeable circumstances.

When I first began to study philosophy, there was not much concern with its political implications. One thought of philosophers as being a few removes from the public forum, concerned with loftier matters, operating far from the untidiness of the social scene in a cool oasis where the imagination could play and consciousness unfold at its own pace. It was a pure world, to be sure, and the purist view is by no means an obsolete one. Just the other day I heard a well-known philosopher in heated argument with a campus activist say that the responsibilities of a professional philosopher end with his profession, that his political obligations qua philosopher were nil.