On June 1, 1958, following a genuine coup-d'état at Algiers led by European colonials and army leaders General de Gaulle returned to power. A new constitution established the Fifth Republic, which, in contrast to the Third Republic (1875–1940) and to the Fourth (1946–1958), provided for a strong and stable executive power. Twenty years later, in the spring of 1978, legislative elections of tremendous importance for France and for the whole West will take place in France. Already all of France is excited about the result of the debate which seems to center on the kind of society France will have: either the continuation of a liberal regime or the coming to power of a Marxist regime with all the incertitudes this prospect implies for the future of freedom.

In recent years two ideas concerning America's republicanism have gained fairly general currency. First, there is now a growing recognition that a shift in understanding occurred in the decade after the revolution over the nature of republicanism and the political, social, and moral prerequisites necessary for establishing such a government. In particular, the notion of the absolute necessity of “virtue” or “public spiritedness” as the operative principle of republicanism became, for most American political thinkers, not only problematic but nearly indefensible. Second, there is a growing body of literature, journalistic and popular as well as scholarly, calling upon us to reopen the question of civic virtue and to reexamine anew its connection with republican health. After briefly reviewing the theoretical and practical connections made in the revolutionary era between virtue and self-government, this article will attempt to trace the causes for the early declension of the necessity of virtue in America's understanding of the foundations of republicanism. This accomplished, concerned citizens might then be able to evaluate more carefully the contemporary rediscovery of the links between moral character and modern republicanism by contemporary scholars and public men.

In June, 1974, the two Germanys completed the official “normalization of relations” between them. In the annals of diplomatic history this final act was unique. The two states exchanged, not ambassadors, but “permanent representatives.” Of these, the West German envoy was accredited to East Berlin's foreign ministry as the representative of a foreign country. His East German counterpart, on the other hand, was to deal with the Federal Chancellery in Bonn, in accordance with West Germany's view of the special nature of the East-West German relationship. The West Germans insisted that while there was no longer one German state, there still existed one German nation; this precluded the treatment of the two Germanys as foreign countries. The German Democratic Republic (GDR), however, maintained that not only had the one German state come to an end, but that there existed now, along with the two states, two different nations, one socialist, the other bourgeoiscapitalist. Because of the wholly different systems on which they were based, East and West Germany had nothing in common anymore and constituted two entirely separate, hence foreign, countries. As such, they could establish contact with each other only by means of the customary diplomatic relations. The complex procedure by which relations were in the end established was a compromise between these differing views.

Of all the Fabians Sydney Olivier (1859–1943) was the only one who became interested in the extension of Fabian socialism, in one form or another, to the British colonies. One reason for this perhaps is that he was the only one among the first generation of Fabians who was extremely conscious of his mixed origin. “I have,” he once wrote to his wife in 1884, “a rather fatal facility of seeing several sides to many questions at the same time. That is the result, I expect, of my being such a mixture of French, Irish, and Puritan-Saxon blood. I have two or three brains, and one is always criticizing the other. I shall never be a single-minded bigot.” In an age when European civilization was believed to be “everything” and everything else “nothing” such a temperament was highly conducive to the entertainment of sympathies toward non-European peoples and lands. A biographer of the Webbs came very close to saying this. “Sydney Olivier,” she remarked, “with his rich background of culture, tinged with a streak that can only be called romantic, perhaps derived from his Latin heredity, was … the voice predominantly of the moral sense.” And as is usual in several such controversies concerning the Fabian Society, the word of Bernard Shaw can never be neglected. To Shaw the French ancestry of Olivier enabled the latter to form an objective view of the British Empire and its role in history and it also helped him to get along quite well with non-English Britons.