The contemporary British Liberal Party sturdily refuses to die. For nearly three decades family allegiances, traditional loyalties, and youthful hopes have preserved for it a dwindling minority status. The Liberals have sought to persuade the electorate with fresh faces and fresh ideas. Still drawing upon the nonconformist tradition they have offered the electorate only a chance to protest and not a possible government. This opportunity to protest against the Leviathan parties, Labour and Conservative, has been a major source of its occasional resurgence in by-elections. The Liberal Party is in many respects the victim of its success. Liberalism, broader than the Party, in pervading British society and parties, could not without drastic alteration become the distinguishing creed of a party. The proponents of change, the sectarian and radical Liberals, were divided, and their estate has been taken over by diverse heirs. Some of the views of Richard Cobden and John Bright became anachronistic, and others were enacted into law which Tories and Labour have preserved. Other elements of radicalism were associated with the Conservative and Labour Parties. Historically the interests attached to the Liberal Party did not cohere well. Even the moments of past liberal greatness, the periods of Gladstone's and Lloyd George's leadership, do not provide a sturdy base of future hope. These inspiring periods, indeed, seem to indicate that to be a dominant national force the Liberal Party requires leaders of unusual and towering genius who strain the bonds of party.

It is perhaps of the nature of wars that they should hasten developments endemic in a society and bring to pass in a few short years what would also have happened under conditions of peace, but in a much longer span of time. This at least has been in some measure the effect of the recent war on Great Britain's position in the world. It is now apparent and generally recognized that the situation of privilege if not domination which was the lot of the English people from the time before the Seven Years War—or from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards—has come to an end. Perhaps this change in England's position has been recognized for some while in the United States. On the other hand Americans have perhaps never realized the striking contrast in the past between the standard of living and the stability and security of this island and that of the larger continental countries and centers of force—France and Germany.

The contemporary modus operandi of the Soviets in Ethiopia seems in many ways to be a refined and ideologically refurbished version of that of pre-Revolutionary days.

Russia's interest in Ethiopia is centuries old. An offer to join forces with Ethiopia and the Protestant West in the struggle against the Mohammedan Turks reached Moscow before the time of Peter the Great. Hiob Ludolf's pioneer work, Historia Aethiopica, was translated into Russian in the seventeenth century, and, nearly 150 years ago, the teaching of the Amharic language became a part of the Khar'kov University curriculum.

When Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik party, was appointed by the second all-Russian Soviet Congress as chairman of the Council of People's Commissars in November 1917, neither he nor his adversaries believed that the new regime would last very long. Trotski tells how a conservative Russian officer helped to defend Petrograd against the advancing troops of the counter-revolution because he hated liberals and democrats and did not believe that the Bolsheviks could stay in power. And Lenin was very proud when he could announce that the Bolshevik regime had lasted longer than the abortive Parisian Commune of 1871.

In an important 1984 paper, “The Moral Education Theory of Punishment,” Jean Hampton argues that the practice of inflicting painful criminal punishments is justified only if punishment is morally educative. Hampton's suggestion forms the point of departure for this article on Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. I show that Dostoevsky agrees with Hampton that punishment should aim at moral reform; however, Dostoevsky presents no evidence that self-punishment or legal punishment reliably cultivates respect for law, legal authority, oneself, or others as moral agents. Instead, Dostoevsky's post-Siberian writings are highly critical of Russian criminal justice, and emphasize that moral education comes through dialogue, reflection, and criticism. This highly individualized treatment may be experienced as painful, but it does not have to result from, and it may even be impeded by, legal “hard treatment.”

This article examines the influence of Fyodor Dostoevsky on Albert Camus's political philosophy of revolt. The aim is to clarify Camus's reactions to the problems of absurdity, nihilism, and transcendence through an analysis of his literary and philosophical engagement with Dostoevsky. I make three related claims. First, I claim that Camus's philosophy of revolt is informed in crucial ways by Dostoevsky's accounts of religious transcendence and political nihilism. Second, that Camus's conceptualization of the tension between nihilism and transcendence corresponds to and is personified by the dialogue between Ivan Karamazov and Father Zossima in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. Finally, that Camus uses his novel The Plague to bridge the moral and metaphysical divide between these two characters. In particular, I argue that Camus offers a distinct vision of revolt in The Plague, which clarifies both the practical implications of revolt and his philosophical rejoinder to Dostoevsky.

When a gulf develops between the men concerned with the practice of a subject and their brethren concerned with research in that subject, the explanation usually offered by the practitioner is that the scholars have become “too theoretical.” A gulf now separates students of international affairs from men concerned with the development and execution of foreign policy but, strangely enough, one of the principal factors helping to create this situation is that the concerns of the student are not theoretical enough.

In his Defence (1787–1788), John Adams rebuts French criticism of the legislative checks and balances present in most American constitutions. His aim, however, is not merely to conserve the constitutional status quo. In addition, he seeks to challenge younger Americans to reform all American constitutions by improving the tripartite legislative balance in them. That reform will be possible only on the basis of a reformed political science. Adams designed his Defence to provide his younger audience with that corrected political science, but to do so without undermining the authority and constitutional achievements of their Fathers. He does this primarily by offering an improved specimen of the kind of “reading and reasoning” that had informed the Founding generation. In it he rehabilitates certain “gloomy” authors as useful to republican political science, especially in their understanding of the passion for distinction and its place in republican government.

National self-determination and the United Nations are modern concepts of political thought. Of the two the first is older and has struck much stronger roots. Its origin can be traced back to the American and French revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century. The latter gained recognition only in the period of the First World War. Both owe their conceptual frame and their ideological content to modem Western civilization, above all to Anglo-American thought. Yet the two concepts are to a degree contradictory: the United Nations envisages an international or supranational order at a time when nationalism—the insistence on national independence, self-determination, and self-expression as supreme political values and emotional guides—has for the first time in history become a world-wide phenomenon.

This study traces the development during World War II of official American attitudes toward Palestine. Utilizing recently released official papers of President Franklin D. Roosevelt at Hyde Park, New York, and documentation in the Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem, our goal is to describe early American efforts to accommodate policy to the complexities of Middle Eastern politics. While relevant documents are still unavailable, the diplomatic and domestic politics chronicled here may provide better perspective than has hitherto been possible.

In the 1820's and 1830's the romantic movement was at the height of its influence throughout Europe* In its origins, among the Lake poets in England and in the circle around the brothers Schlegel in Germany, romanticism opposed the libertarian and rationalist tendencies of the French Revolution. In its later stage romanticism presented a more complex attitude, its imagination turned simultaneously to the fascination of the past and the Middle Ages and to the appeal of the future happiness of free men. Under the quiet surface of the Biedermeier the unrest of the Napoleonic wars continued to arouse in the educated young generation a longing for change, for activity, for a new sense of self-fulfillment.

THE relations between the Church and State have been for many years the subject of interest to the political theorist, the student of contemporary totalitarian movements, and of particular concern to the student of comparative political institutions and systems. To the student of political theory it invokes the old conflict between the spiritual and the temporal authorities, between the papal authority and the claim of the emerging national states. For the student of modern totalitarianism it raises, without answering, the crucial question of the extent to which a totalitarian system can tolerate competing ideologies within the same national community. Finally, for the student of comparative institutions, in certain circumstances (for example, in Poland), it presents certain features of uniqueness that call for explanation.

More and more decisions in our societies are made by algorithms. What are such decisions like, and how do they compare to human decision-making? I contrast central features of algorithmic decision-making with three key elements—plurality, natality, and judgment—of Hannah Arendt's political thought. In “Arendtian practices,” human beings come together as equals, exchange arguments, and make joint decisions, sometimes bringing something new into the world. With algorithmic decision-making taking over more and more areas of life, opportunities for “Arendtian practices” are under threat. Moreover, there is the danger that algorithms are tasked with decisions for which they are ill-suited. Analyzing the contrast with Arendt's thinking can be a starting point for delineating realms in which algorithmic decision-making should or should not be welcomed.

Among contemporary scholars who write about classical Greece, Josiah Ober and Paul Rahe are especially adept at navigating the territory shared by history and political theory and illuminating the relevance of Greek history for our time. The historical approach each takes in the works under review does not easily fall into the categories—monumental, antiquarian, and critical history— delineated by Nietzsche in the essay to which my subtitle alludes. Yet, in treating these works together, I am guided by a question that Nietzsche raises at the conclusion of his “untimely meditation” in recalling the Delphic injunction Gnōthi seauton, “Know thyself.” The Greeks’ cultural inheritance, he argues, was a chaos of foreign ideas—Semitic, Babylonian, Lydian, and Egyptian—and gods, and it was only when the Greeks began to organize this chaos in accordance with the Delphic injunction that they were prevented from being swamped by their own history and became the model for all civilized peoples. The works under review are extraordinarily rich, and I will not do justice to their many arguments. Rather, I organize my consideration of them by focusing on this question: What is the relation between the study of Greek history and the search for self-knowledge at the core of Greek political philosophy?