The Liberal's Dilemma and the Anarchism of Youth. The sensitive individual in the Western world has nearly always been impelled to protest the injustices of. the political and social order in which he finds himself. For example, very early in life Stephen Spender observed that "to be born is to be a Robinson Crusoe, cast up by elemental powers upon an island," that "all men are not free to share what nature offers here … are not permitted to explore the world into which they are born." Throughout their lives they are "sealed into leaden slums as into living tombs." To this general awareness of the plight of the poor, the New Left in this country has added a sense of burning moral indignation that the colored minority has also been sealed into ghettos and deprived of civil rights and human dignity.

There are countries in the world where students traditionally play a constant, or at least recurrent, role in national politics. This is, generally speaking, not the case in Europe. Part of the tradition of European universities is a disdaining aloofness from the surrounding society and its "petty politics." This tradition did not exclude endless and passionate theoretical debates on the "perfect state," with recurrent Platonic dreams of an intellectual aristocracy governing the lower race, but if did not encourage a student to "dirty his hands" with real politics. If some students betrayed their caste by getting involved in outside politics, they soon dropped out of sight of their colleagues, and, more likely than not, out of their, courses as well.

The right of the Executive to withhold from its citizens a large part of the raw information it possesses is only one aspect of a complicated situation, and when public officials place an undue emphasis on such withholding they do so at their ultimate peril. There is also the Executive's obligation of keeping Americans informed of its general purposes in the area of foreign policy, and this responsibility arises from the requirements of practical politics as well as from democratic principles. This responsibility operates on two different levels, although, in practice they can hardly be neatly delineated. The government should present its general view of the world, the alternatives open to it in the field of foreign and military affairs, the arguments for and against these alternatives, and an estimate of the burdens that are likely to be involved. It need not, and probably in many cases should not, go into great detail on these matters, although it should provide considerably more detailed information to Congress than it does when addressing the American people directly.

Man, it has been said, appears to be the missing link between anthropoid apes and human beings. The import of this not entirely facetious remark, attributed to the ethologist Konrad Lorenz, is that the human animal, like it or not, is animal as well as human, instinctive as well as rational. Man's nature, according to psychological and anthropological authorities, is an incongruous synthesis of intelligence and instinct, of humane empathy and animal egoism. His intelligence gives him the means to control his animal instincts but is more often used to rationalize them, enabling him to pretend that they do not exist, or to disguise them behind false and ennobling names. Thus, for example, envy may be called disdain and selfishness self-respect, pigheadedness may be called pride and arrogance responsibility. Ingenious nomenclature of this kind is particularly prevalent in the field of politics.

Of all of the activities in which the United States is currently engaged abroad, one of the few of which we can be unreservedly proud is the work of our Peace Corps. Tapping the idealism of the younger generation, disciplining it, directing it, and giving it concrete form, the Peace Corps has come to represent abroad something very near the best of American life and values and society. (I spent five weeks in the winter of 1966-1967 visiting Peace Corps volunteers in Latin America and came back a strong admirer of the Peace Corps, its philosophy and, most of all, of the volunteers.)

The doctrine of the "just war" has a hallowed place in the history of political and legal thought, while its more inflammatory counterpart, "revolutionary war," cannot call upon such a long and distinguished pedigree. This is not so surprising as it may at first seem since the doctrine of the "just war," or its momentary variation, has proved flexible enough to accommodate all sorts of wars for every kind of reason. I am prepared to argue that the claimants for either doctrine base their reasons for waging wars on similar, if not identical, principles. Hence the concept of "revolutionary war," to the extent that it may be a discernible and separate concept, can be subsumed in most cases under the general category of the "just war." What has happened in the long history of institutionalized warfare among nations is that the underlying reasons for legitimizing war have been overwhelmed by legal norms — a legal edifice so to speak — that have of necessity favored the established authorities.

Sunday, February 11th. The whole day was passed in the company of a certain Colonel Lao, spit and polish, genial, a little self-conscious in his well-cut uniform. He was a Vietnamese representative on the war crimes tribunal and had worked for almost a year on the commission in Vietnam and had attended the Stockholm tribunal.

One six-hour exchange. Perhaps one should not dignify it by a word which does not express what we endured at ten-thousand miles remove from the military mind. Colonel Lao began by expressing, with typical Asian tentativeness, his understanding that we were perhaps quite well-acquainted with the history of his country leading up to the American invasion.

To be an eye-witness of revolutionary events has never been a guarantee of accurate observation, but it helps in sensing an atmosphere which otherwise soon evaporates. Hence my tentative conclusion that what happened in Paris in May-June of this year was a revolution in the 1789 sense of the word; if it did not become 1792-3-4 (anyway, not yet), it is because General de Gaulle is less honest and more firm than was Louis XVI. On May 30, in a four-minute speech, he said No! to disorder, and permitted this speech to become the instantaneous rallying point for various opponents of revolution.

We see the present with the eyes of the past, and the past with the eyes of the present. This is a truism: but one that is nonetheless worth repeating at a time when it is fashionable to believe that we live in a posthistoric age, that the past has little to tell us that is new or that is true. But what is fashionable is not correct, for all that we know comes from the past, from some kind of a past; all of our knowledge is essentially past-knowledge, whether we are conscious of this or not. Politics, for example, is not only inseparable from historical interpretation: it is a certain kind of historical interpretation. And since this interpretation is a living and changing thing in our minds (for "history," contrary to the generally accepted view, is not a static account of past periods) the interpretation involves, inevitably, the changing and moving "present": it is part and parcel of the movement of ideas. And the problem of how ideas move nowadays has preoccupied my mind (note the implicit meaning of the word pre-occupy) for a long time.