There were and still are several ways of meeting — getting acquainted with, knowing — the philosopher Jacques Maritain, the centenary of whose birth is this year. We could consult people who knew him, heard him lecture and hobnobbed with him; we could read his voluminous letters to and from Yves Simon, letters to which we hope the public will soon have access; and we might ask him what he meant by “Christian philosophy,” a key concept in many of his sixty published books.

The 1930's posed difficult moral problems for European Catholics. First came Mussolini's questionable adventure in belated colonialism in Ethiopia. Then the war in Spain suddenly, and with piercing sharpness, posed the moral problems of civil war. For the most influential Catholic thinker of his time, Jacques Maritain, the war in Spain was a challenging difficulty. Though Maritain openly refused his allegiance to Franco, and thereby became a scandal to Catholics horrified by the Spanish republic's attacks on the official Church, his reflections on Spain gave impetus to a current of thought in Catholic circles that culminated in the declaration of the Second Vatican Council on the relations between church and state. Hence, as so often happens, a time of confusion and fraternal strife was also a time of clarification, and a time of despair broadened into a time of hope.

In recent times, the issues surrounding crime and punishment have seldom been discussed from the vantage point of political philosophy. Instead, they have tended to become the province of lawyers, psychologists, and specialists in ethics or the philosophy of language. Whatever the merits of their respective contributions may be, such writers usually have assumed that the basic questions of political legitimacy and the state's authority to enforce criminal law have been settled. In effect, they ask: given a state which already possesses a legitimate system of criminal justice, whom should the state punish (if it does at all), why, and under what circumstances?

Everyone knows that the art of political rhetoric has declined drastically in the modern world. Observers of the decline often measure and deplore it, but few pause to reflect that one of the reasons for the decline may be the acceptance of certain liberal principles which entail limits to the scope and power of political speech. Even such a clear-sighted observer of the interplay of language and politics as George Orwell argued that the simplification and purification of language went hand in hand with the liberalization of politics. Orwell was not mistaken when he coupled perverted speech with totalitarian politics. But it is dangerous to assume that excellent political speech is at home in liberal regimes, or that liberal speech can be as psychologically satisfactory as illiberal speech. Orwell recognized this point when he noticed in his review of Hitler's Mein Kampf that the liberal “hedonistic attitude to life” fails to satisfy some of the irrepressible longings of the human soul, and leaves room for the kind of appeal made by Hitler. There is an inherent weakness in liberal rhetoric which cuts it off from some of the sources of political conviction and community.

Despite the high seriousness and obviously increasing importance of international politics in our time, something recognizable as a philosophy of the subject, in the view of some scholars, has not yet succeeded in emerging from the demise of “banal” positivism. This lamentable and barely explicable state of affairs has led several philosophically inclined scholars to urge the search for a philosophy of international relations. The form, scope and content of the proposed philosophy have received less attention; the philosophers in question have been content to limit their philosophical inquiry to a species of historical-philosophical archaeology consisting of, for example, the uncovering of Kant's conception of philosophical reason as it relates to international relations or, the recovery of “the just war for classical theory” or, the discovery tout court of a conception of “justice” for international relations. Without putting such indispensable efforts at risk or preempting the results of such scholarship, I see two obstacles to their success. First, there has been little or no comparable effort directed toward indicating, except in highly schematic form, what any such philosophy might consist in and, secondly, it is still unclear what relationship there could be between any such proposed philosophy and alternative conceptions of international relations such as empirical systems theory.