Alasdair MacIntyre was installed in 1989 as the first occupant of the McMahon/Hank Chair in Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. On April 18, 1990, he delivered his inaugural lecture, “The Privatization of Good,” before a large and appreciative audience in Notre Dame's Center for Continuing Education. He invited three Notre Dame colleagues to comment on his presentation: Donald P. Kommers, Professor of Law and Government, and Editor of The Review of Politics; William David Solomon, Associate Professor of Philosophy; and Richard McCormick, S.J., John A. O'Brien Professor of Christian Ethics. The following pages include the inaugural address, the remarks of two of the three commentators, and Professor Maclntyre's response. The editors wish to thank Professor MacIntyre for his cooperation in publishing his inaugural address.

John Rawls expounds a new liberal political theory that supposedly differs from traditional varieties in the narrowness of its scope and the distinctive solution it offers to the problem of legitimacy. The contrast between Rawls's “political liberalism” and “ethical liberalism” is said to emerge strikingly in the approach to political education each entails. But the differences Rawls stresses between the two liberalisms are illusory, and the real implications of his theory for political education clearly show this. However, Rawls does offer a powerful case for a liberal political theory, albeit of a traditional kind, and its educational agenda can be endorsed as a corrective to political domination and manipulation, even though the agenda must be pursued at the cost of some ethical diversity.

During the past several years, radical right-wing populist parties have made impressive electoral gains in a growing number of West European countries. Their dramatic surge to political prominence has obscured the fact that these parties hardly form a homogeneous party group. Generally, it is possible to distinguish between neo-liberal and national populist parties. Both types of parties are a response to the profound economic, social, and cultural transformation of advanced societies interpreted as a transition from industrial welfare to postindustrial individualized capitalism. National populist parties are primarily working-class parties which espouse a radically xenophobic and authoritarian program. Neoliberal parties appeal to a mixed social constituency and tend to stress the marketoriented, libertarian elements of their program over xenophobic ones. Rather than being mere short-lived protest phenomena, radical right-wing populist parties are a reflection and expression of new political conflicts created by the transition to postindustrial capitalism.

Several critics of Indian secularism maintain that given the pervasive role of religion in the lives of the Indian people, secularism, defined as the separation of politics or the state from religion, is an intolerable, alien, modernist imposition on the Indian society. This, I argue, is a misreading of the Indian constitutional vision, which enjoins the state to be equally tolerant of all religions and which therefore requires the state to steer clear of both theocracy or fundamentalism and the “wall of separation” model of secularism. Regarding the dichotomy, which the critics draw between Nehruvian secularism and Gandhian religiosity, I suggest that what is distinctive to Indian secularism is the complementation or articulation between the democratic state and the politics of satya and ahimsa, whereby the relative autonomy of religion and politics from each other can be used for the moral-political reconstruction of both the religious traditions and the modern state.

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.

The rise of fascist, communist and totalitarian movements and the development of the two totalitarian regimes, Stalin's after 1929 and Hitler's after 1938, took place against a background of a more or less general, more or less dramatic breakdown of all traditional authorities. Nowhere was this breakdown the direct result of the regimes or movements themselves, but it seemed as though totalitarianism, in the form of regimes as well as of movements, was best fitted to take advantage of a general political and social atmosphere in which the validity of authority itself was radically doubted.

In just three decades rational choice theory has emerged as one of the most active, influential, and ambitious subfields in the discipline of political science. Rational choice theory contends that political behavior is best explained through the application of its supposedly “value-neutral” assumptions which posit man as a self-interested, purposeful, maximizing being. Through the logic of methodological individualism, assumptions about human nature are treated as empirical discoveries. My central argument is that by assuming that self-interest is an empirically established component of human nature, rational choice theory supports and perpetuates a political life which is antithetical to important tenets of normative democratic theory. Rational choice theory offers an incoherent account of democratic citizenship and produces a political system which shows a constant biased against political change and pursuit of the public interest. This article concludes by discussing the merits of democratic deliberation for achieving these transformative ends.

The vast majority of all human beings alive on earth is affected in some measure by the totalitarian mass movements of our time. Whether men are members, supporters, fellow-travellers, naive connivers, actual or potential victims, whether they are under the domination of a totalitarian government, or whether they are still free to organize their defenses against the disaster, the relation to the movements has become an intimate part of their spiritual, intellectual, economic, and physical existence. The putrefaction of Western civilization, as it were, has released a cadaveric poison spreading its infection through the body of humanity. What no religious founder, no philosopher, no imperial conqueror of the past has achieved — to create a community of mankind by creating a common concern for all men — has now been realized through the community of suffering under the earthwide expansion of Western foulness.

This article explores the problem of why most Continental languages lack a term which distinguishes the concept of policy, and to what extent political scientists writing in them are handicapped. It employs a diachronic approach to explore historical shifts of meaning within the “polis-family of words” in English and German, with reference also to French and other languages. The analysis is related to the manner in which the concept and term for state flourished m these languages over time, and explores why a convergence in usages of the English policy and the Continental Policey was aborted in the early nineteenth century. The bureaucratic and ideological roots of the broad Continental police concept are traced. Then synchronic analysis is used to explore how in the contemporary setting the presence or absence of a policy term effects communication and conceptualization.

Neorealism has recently been portrayed as an attempt to systematize the insights of classical realism in order to put them on a more solid theoretical foundation. This essay rejects this common characterization of the emergence of neorealism by arguing that neorealism constitutes a fundamentally different conceptualization of international politics than that provided by classical realists. Neorealism is best understood as an alternative to classical realism shaped by enduring liberal traditions in the United States, which is where neorealism emerged and thrives.

This Special Issue is meant to inaugurate or help launch a field of inquiry which is either nonexistent or at most fledgling and embryonic in contemporary academia: the field of “comparative political theory” or “comparative political philosophy.” What is meant by these titles is an inquiry which, in a sustained fashion, reflects upon the status and meaning of political life no longer in a restricted geographical setting but in the global arena. The motivation behind this initiative is a transformation which profoundly shapes our waning century: the emergence of the “global village” involving the steadily intensifying interaction among previously (more or less) segregated civilizations or cultural zones. Although human lives everywhere are deeply affected today by the global forces of the market, technology, and the media, the implications of these changes have not yet fully penetrated into Western intellectual discourse. As practiced in most Western universities, the study of political theory or political philosophy revolves basically around the canon of Western political thought from Plato to Marx or Nietzsche—with occasional recent concessions to strands of feminism and multiculturalism as found in Western societies.

In this article a widespread misperception of Aristotle's political thought is challenged, a misperception shared even by his champions among recent political theorists: that his concept of political community is derived from an image of organic growth and identity, and thus does not account for political conflict. Familiarity with liberal political thought and institutions has led most of Aristotle's contemporary interpreters to look for counterimages to liberal images of political society in his work. As a result, they tend to ignore or underplay the connections which Aristotle draws between political community and political conflict. By interpreting Aristotle's concepts of political community and political friendship in light of his analysis of political argument in Book 3 of the Politics, the article tries to uncover these connections and their implications.

Lot is a possible alternative to election as a democratic means of selection. The prime historical instance of its political use is classical Athens. Lot was an important expression of the Athenian democrats' commitment to equality, more egalitarian than election which assumed equality of opportunity rather than desert. Lot also had certain important political effects, such as reducing factionalism and maintaining the authority of the assembly. It helped to make the Council and the courts representative cross sections of the assembly. Election, however, was preferable when important decisions were to be entrusted to only a few people. In modern democratic societies, lot is not uncommon as a distributive device but is rarely used for selecting political officials. Election remains more democratically efficient for large polities, but lot could be seriously considered in communities which approach the small size and intimacy of the Greek city-states.

From right to left, from Reagan to Mitterrand, seemingly everyone wants to befriend Tocqueville and line him up on his on her side. No writer, except perhaps Orwell, has such appeal across political boundaries, and a judicious quotation from Tocqueville, no matter how much out of context, is believed to buttress any argument. While I too have spent a couple of decades of my intellectual life admiring and writing about Tocqueville,1 I have been unable either to forget or ignore a seamy side of Tocqueville, a dark side that has its roots both in his aristocratic heritage and also in his century's rush to global conquest. His two hundredth birthday is a good time to shed light on his embrace of war and empire.

The activities of state attorneys general have received little scholarly attention despite their growing importance as national policymakers. This article examines how New Federalism and divided government during the past two decades has altered the political context of state legal work and how state attorneys general have responded. In addition to establishing new mechanisms for integrating state law enforcement policies, state attorneys general have assumed a more coordinated and proactive litigating posture in the federal courts. These developments have allowed states to launch effective challenges to federal law enforcement policy and to protect state regulation from federal preemption.

How far ought good liberals to go in accommodating parents with religious objections to the public school curriculum? This article argues that liberal democratic ideals are best honored when we allow parents to structure their children's education in ways compatible with their religious beliefs. Both liberal and democratic theorists, as well as a number of recent judicial decisions, are criticized for opposing such accommodation and for arguing their case against religious parents on a distorted characterization of religious parents' goals. An account of religious parents' concerns that avoids privileging a secular worldview is presented and this account is used to argue for the political benefits of a broad “principle of parental deference.” In conclusion, a new account of where public schools ought properly to draw the line, detailing three exceptional cases in which parental religious concerns ought not to be accommodated, is offered.

In plato's Theaetetus Socrates develops the character of the philosopher, the man of knowledge, in contrast to the atheoretical, practical man.* He endeavors to demonstrate the distinctive qualities of the philosopher by emphasizing his peculiar attitude towards the political sphere.

First, the philosopher has no political ambitions, and he does not care about what is going on in the political sphere.

Wherever one looks in the Iberic-Latin world, corporatist or neocorporatist forms of authority and sociopolitical organization appear to have staged a resurgence. One is used to thinking about such traditional states and societies as Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Paraguay in terms of their authoritarian and corporatist structures, and Portugal has by now been a self-proclaimed corporatist state for some 40 years. We shall have more to say regarding these “persistent strains” later on; what concerns us now is the apparent reemergence of corporatist ideology and organization in a variety of rapidly modernizing systems. Brazil, for instance, has always been less corporatist than Portugal in theory and in law, but today is probably just as corporatist in actual practice. Research on Mexico has by this time largely abandoned the approach that stressed that country's quasi-democratic character or its supposed democratic aspirations in favor of an approach that takes Mexico on its own terms and analyzes its frankly authoritarian and corporatist structures. The resurgence of Peronismo in Argentina clearly carries with it echoes of the corporatist, in this case “justicialist,” solutions of the 1930's and 1940's. In Peru the military elite has vowed to carry through a “revolution from above” employing corporatist ideas and organizations to structure popular participation at the grass-roots and intermediary levels and reaching up to the Council of Ministers and the central state apparatus. And of course in Chile we have seen both Allende's abortive design to install a unicameral legislature based on corporative functional representation, as well as the plans by the generals that overthrew him to inaugurate a similarly functionally representative congress (though obviously the groups represented and their weights would be significantly different in these two designs) and to deal with price, wage, and production issues through a government regulated and controlled system of gremio-sindicato relations.

This paper seeks to locate Adam Smith's thought within corruption debates and traditions. The discussion commences by outlining the material and intellectual context within which Smith wrote, after which it disputes claims that Smith may be readily aligned with either a classical or proto-Marxist “corruption and decline” tradition. The remainder of the paper is devoted to exploring in detail how he approached the topic. It is argued that he does not fit easily into any of the recognizable corruption frameworks but that he forges one all his own, borne of his anxieties about the activities of the English state in a rapidly expanding economy and his desire to develop the new science of political economy.

A Word is like a coin. With a particular coin different men at different times purchase goods of the same or very similar value. With a particular word different men at different times designate the same or a very similar value. Every coin in the course of its history is subjected to different changes in value; for the same coin may suddenly obtain more or less in exchange. Exactly thus does the value of a word change; it can at one time denote more, at another less; a more comprehensive or a more restricted concept. And just as for the coin, there comes also for the word the day on which it is “removed from circulation.” As a coin can become valueless, so a word can become senseless, insignificant.