Since its publication, Eichmann in Jerusalem has provoked a storm of controversy. With a few exceptions, critics reacted to the substance of Arendt's thesis with considerable bitterness and hostility. This article argues that her detractors badly misunderstood Arendt because they were insufficiently conversant with, or unaware of, her political theory. Fundamental to this theory, articulated at length in her The Human Condition, is the crucial distinction between the public and the private. None of her critics, including those who sympathized with Arendt, have understood that her critical analysis of Eichmann's conduct and of the response of the Jewish leadership to the tragic fate that befell their people makes sense on the peculiar terrain of her political theory and particularly in terms of the public-private distinction which lies at the core of this theory.

Hannah Arendt's political theory gains in clarity and resonance when it is placed in the context of German phenomenology and Existenz philosophy. In this essay, the authors examine the points of contact (on the level of ideas rather than personal ties) between Arendt and Martin Heidegger. The argument holds that Arendt followed Heidegger in grafting traditional humanism onto an untraditional, self-consciously antimetaphysical body of thought. Yet almost from the beginning, she struck out in a direction peculiarly her own, seeking to escape a certain contemplative aloofness and remoteness from public affairs which she sensed in Heidegger's fundamental ontology. Against Heidegger, Arendt tried to show that the core values of human rights and dignity cannot be sustained unless one explicitly recognizes the “plurality” of human life and the importance of the public realm in revealing who we are as individuals.

This paper focuses on Pascal's controversial pronouncements on justice, force and law. It proceeds, in light of a preliminary examination of historical context, questions of textual interpretation, and Pascal's method and study of man, to show in Pascal's thought a theory of law which (a) rejects rationalist and naturalist explanations, (b) incorporates positivism and by implication what is today called “historicism,” and (c) transcends both positivism and historicism dialectically in a Christocentric biblical view of cosmic order.

When discussing citizenship Rousseau insists on the primacy of instrumental and discursive reasoning, whereas when discussing patriotism he accords primacy to intrinsic reasons of sentiment. The essay explores the different meanings of the two concepts and points to their inherent tension as well as to the possibility of their coming into conflict. It finds that Rousseau, evidently doubting the adequacy of instrumental reasons as explanations or justifications of political commitment, tends to elevate intrinsic sentiment above discursive rationality. Implicit therefore in Rousseau's position on patriotism and citizenship, the essay concludes, is not merely the potential of a dual theory of political willing and political rationality but also the potential of a threat to rational discourse as a mode of determining and accounting for political action.

The work of Eric Voegelin is primarily to be understood in relation to the problems created by the modern civilizational disorder. They are the problems that not only motivated his original search for order in man, society and history, but also determine the new directions in which his inquiry continues to move. This essay first traces the principal stages through which his thought acquired progressively more adequate instruments for a theoretical penetration of the nature of the modern disorder. Second, it examines the alternative vision of order that has correlatively emerged as the appropriate remedy in the course of this diagnostic analysis. Finally, it attempts a critical evaluation of the efficacy of Voegelin's critique as a response to the simultaneously spiritual, intellectual and political crisis of the age. In particular his reluctance to regard Christianity as the answer to the anxieties at the root of the modern disorder is explored at some length.