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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

John Carroll was disturbed about the future of Catholicism as he surveyed the scene in the aftermath of the American Revolution. As a supporter of the patriot movement he was pleased that the policy of religious toleration allowed Catholics to participate fully in the political life of the new nation. No doubt he also perceived that the wartime alliance with Catholic France had done much to improve the status of the church among his countrymen. But these positive features were outweighed by the disorganization of the church and the apathy of her ministers. There were only about two dozen priests in the new republic, several of whom were too old to be of any use. But even the younger ones seemed listless and demoralized.