There are several crucial reasons for the need to reform the world economy. First, the worldwide inflation, a terrible cancerous disease which, if uncontrolled, might destroy the roots of economic development. Second (a direct consequence of inflation), a sudden imbalance in our international monetary system: capital flight in monstrous dimensions, devaluation of important reserve currencies, the United States dollar, the English pound, followed by the Japanese yen and a number of European currencies. Third, growing unemployment all over the world, again as a consequence of inflation and of a worldwide lack of confidence. Finally, but not least, the growing conflict of the developing countries, mainly in the Southern Hemisphere, with the industrialized world mainly in the Northern. This north-south struggle, brewing for long years, has reached the dimensions of what we might call an “economic cold war” on a worldwide level. Thus far, efforts to find new solutions which would be satisfactory to both consumers and producers have failed.

Americans have not always adjusted comfortably to their peculiar heritage as the first revolutionary people of the modern era. Yet the idea of revolution fascinated the founding generation. The reflective, educated leaders based their speculation on the classical conception they inherited from the English Whig or Common-wealth radicals and the venerable ancients. Many went beyond that perspective in the effort to explain the changes produced by the experiences of 1763 to 1789. These thinkers strove to articulate a distinctively American conception of revolution. This article deals with the contribution toward that end of one man, thus making no claim to definitiveness in any broader sense. James Wilson of Scotland and Pennsylvania merits special study as a seminal thinker of considerable significance in American history. For he stands at the beginning of a line of American theorists and activists who not only espoused the idea of revolution but based American constitutionalism on that seemingly contradictory foundation. From reluctant rebel, Wilson emerged as the preeminent spokesman for a new, progressive ideology which fostered one important strand in the variegated fabric of American constitutional thought.

John Rawls's book A Theory of Justice1 has been widely looked to not only as a substantive account of the meaning of justice, but also as a model of the procedure by which the requirements of justice may be determined. Rawls terms his mode of approach to justice “moral theory,” and apparently subsumes the traditional discipline of political philosophy under this more inclusive science. At the same time, he claims that his approach is Socratic in nature, and that it “goes back in its essentials to Aristotle's procedure in the Nicomachean Ethics” (pp. 49, 51). “Moral theory,” from this point of view, is simply a new name for the enterprise pursued by the great political philosophers from Socrates onwards. But, surprisingly, despite the number of outstanding thinkers who devoted themselves to this enterprise, little progress was ever made in it, for the theories with which we have been left, according to Rawls, remain “primitive and have grave defects” (p. 52). It is Rawls's claim to have developed a “theory of justice” that is superior to any of those devised by previous philosophers, in that it conforms better to the dictates of men's “sense of justice” (p. 52).

The issue of politics and the Catholic Church in Latin America, relegated until recently to nineteenth-century historians, is very much alive today. On the one hand, the church as an institution is enmeshed in public controversy over human rights with repressive regimes from Paraguay to Panama, from Brazil to Chile. When it serves as a shelter for political and social dissent, it is accused by secular authorities of engaging in a “new clericalism.” On the other hand, it has been assailed by critics within for being wed to existing political powers. These radical clergy and lay people believe that the church's social presence is inevitably political, but want to change its alliances to benefit the poor and dispossessed. Furthermore, they believe that the existing order in given situations is aform of “institutionalized violence” against which the Christian response must be “counterviolence.” Such attacks from right and left occur, paradoxically, just at a time when the Latin American church has turned with unprecedented resolve to fundamental pastoral tasks. Politics has thus become a problem just as the hierarchy can claim, with considerable justification, to have eschewedthe practice of partisanship and the pursuit of power.

Rousseau's Confessions is generally regarded simply as his autobiography or, more precisely, as his apology—his defense of his character and conduct against the attacks of his enemies. Yet he himself claims that the work is philosophically significant; the Confessions is intended to be an account of man as he is according to nature. This essay will attempt to uncover the philosophical import of the Confessions especially as it bears upon the question of the individual and society. The Introduction will establish the philosophical context within which Rousseau places his enterprises and will point to the contemporary political significances of that enterprise. In the second section, Rousseau's understanding of himself as a “natural man” will be examined. The third section will show the radical character of the tension between the individual and society as this tension follows from Rousseau's account of the nature of man. Finally, the root of Rousseau's understanding of the political problem having been exposed, Rousseau's status as the champion of the individual's claims against society will be seen to be highly problematic. That is, Rousseau will show himself to be far more critical of contemporary political- and self-consciousness than is generally thought to be the case.