“As I returned, here—I did not return.” With these words of Alfred Doeblin, Eric Voegelin could also have described his German experience of the years 1958 through 1969. That is valid in a general sense, to speak with the poet: “You are no longer the one who left, and you no longer find the home that you left. You don&t know it when you leave, but you suspect it on the way back.” And it is valid in a special sense too, namely, for Voegelin's relationship to German political science. Here too he remained a stranger among strangers, although his presence in Munich left behind important and lasting impulses. Yet a wider reception of his work in Germany came only with delays, and more outside than inside the guild, so that to this day there exists a substantial need of reconsideration by scholars as well as students. Beginners above all encounter in handbooks and introductions only arid clichés about the “Munich School” and its peculiarity, described with few exceptions stereotypically, as “ontological-normative.” But the central figure of Eric Voegelin remains remarkably dimly lit. All the more welcome, then, are the efforts of the initiators of this symposium to illuminate the details of Voegelin's effects in the postwar era. And more welcome still is the long neglected presentation of his major work, Order and History, in German.

In book VII of the Politics, Aristotle requires that the best regime be eusunoptos, “easily taken in at a glance.” Throughout the history of political thought, the attendant ideal of the polis as a compact and surveyable society was particularly influential. However, closer scrutiny of the way in which Aristotle uses eusunoptos suggests that it designates a problem rather than a solution, to wit, the problems of defining political unity and of attuning the individual and the common good. Exploring the different contexts in which eusunoptos occurs in Aristotle's works, this paper argues that it has political, rhetorical, and poetical meanings that cannot be entirely distinguished from each other. As such, the notion is shown to be germane to the general design of book VII, which constructs the best regime in order to bring to light the limits of politics.

John Stuart Mill's account of his education in Autobiography (1873) is typically sifted through three interrelated sets of polarities: nurture/nature; reason/emotion; authority/autonomy. First, the father tried to mold the son's development towards a specific ideal, curbing his spontaneous growth. Second, James relentlessly sharpened John Stuart's analytical prowess to the almost total neglect of his emotional needs. Third, the authoritarianism involved in the design and execution of James Mill's curriculum rendered John Stuart Mill incapable of autonomy. This article argues that the dualities of nurture/nature and reason/emotion are not unambiguous, though ever-present in the reception of the younger Mill's education. Widening our perspective in their examination opens the possibility of a different assessment of that famous education being no education for autonomy.

The American party system has been under attack almost continuously since it took definite form in the time of Andrew Jackson. The criticism has always been dircted at the same point: America's political pluralism, the distinctively American organization of government by compromise of interests, pressure groups and sections. And the aim of the critics from Thaddeus Stevens to Henry Wallace has always been to substitute for this “unprincipled” pluralism a government based as in Europe on “ideologies” and “principles.” But never before—at least not since the Civil War years—has the crisis been as acute as in this last decade; for the political problems which dominate our national life today: foreign policy and industrial policy, are precisely the problems which interest and pressure-group compromise is least equipped to handle. And while the crisis symptoms: a left-wing Thirl Party and the threatened split-off of the Southern Wing, are more alarming in the Democratic Party, the Republicans are hardly much better off. The 1940 boom for the “idealist” Wilkie and the continued inability to attract a substantial portion of the labor vote, are definite signs that the Republican Party too is under severe ideological pressure.

TenYears after Bismarck's creation of the Reich, a Swabian philosopher, Karl Christian Planck, bitterly regretted in his posthumous Testament of a German, that “our people has now entered, similar therein to the Jewish people, its period of selfish national messianism.” Like an Old Testament prophet, he regarded the German nation-state armed to the teeth as a perversion of the true Germany. “If such a universalist people, situated in the heart of Europe, forms in sharp contrast to its preceding history a centralist nation-state and sets before its neighbor nations an example of increased armament, what can result in an age of acute nationalism but total conflict?” Planck foresaw the war of 1914, but he hoped that out of it a reformation of Germany would come. He was too optimistic; the defeat of 1918 brought no reformation but an intensification of the trends of the Bismarckian Reich. With German scholarship leading the march to the abyss, the gulf between Germany and the West grew wider during the Weimar Reich. Thus the catastrophe of 1933 came about, and this in turn led to the war of 1939. The developments after that war, however, fulfilled Planck's hope for a reformation of Germany, for the rise of a new spirit.

The Extraordinary prosperity of the Western peoples in Europe and America at the beginning of the twentieth century, on the eve of the first World War, was reached after a long series of efforts which began at about the time Leonardo da Vinci was born in 1452. In contrast to the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were a period of prosperity in most districts of continental Europe. The Middle Ages drew to a close in the midst of great movements of discovery, colonization, and economic progress.

A number of analyses of American foreign policy suggest that over the course of some two hundred years there have been two distinct themes in the American diplomatic experience. These can be labeled the realist and idealist. At various times first one and then the other appears to have assumed at least a temporary predominance in American thinking and diplomatic activity. The classic statement of the realist approach still remains that which was offered by John Quincy Adams in 1823 in response to pressure on the United States to intervene to assist the Greeks in their war of independence against the Ottoman Turks. “Wherever the flag of freedom may be unfurled,” remarked Adams, the heartfelt sentiments and sympathy of the American people go out to those struggling for freedom. On the other hand, the United States should and could not assume a direct responsibility in such struggles. In Adams' vivid phrase, America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” The Adamsonian or realist approach to American foreign policy then posits that altruistic or moral concerns are essentially irrelevant to the real objectives of a sound national diplomacy, which are the protection of one's own sovereignty and political and economic well-being. In our external relations, then, the focus ultimately must be on power considerations, the development of our strictly personal national interests.

The earliest and most brutal offshoot of Western political absolutism was the colonial imperialism which followed in the wake of Columbus, Magellan, and the other heroes of the Age of Discovery. Characteristically, Western man is wont to regard this epoch as a glorious chapter in his history, as a splendid testimonial to his insatiable quest for knowledge and to his urge to explore the farthest and most remote corners of the planet. But the quest for knowledge and the urge to explore were far from being the only or the most active ingredients in imperialism. Greed, sadism, and lust for power spilled into every corner of the earth whose inhabitants were unable to offer effective resistance to the firearms and cavalry of the new overseers.

In March, 1939, less than two weeks after Hitler marched into Prague, betraying the desperate hope of Munich and crushing the forlorn Czech republic, Franco marched into Madrid, concluding the grim Civil War and extinguishing the last faint hope for the survival of the Spanish Republic. With war clouds gathering over Europe, it seemed only too clear that Nationalist Spain was little more than an Axis satellite, for as Hitler himself a year later observed, without German and Italian aid during the Civil War, “there would today be no Franco.” Yet there was far less gratitude in Spain than there might have been, had the Germans not so avidly sought economic and political returns on their investment in goods and manpower. By the end of the Civil War, German economic interests had penetrated Spain and Spanish Morocco as never before, thanks to a ruthless policy of exacting contractual concessions from the Nationalists as the price of continued support. Moreover, there had been bitter dissension between Hitler and Franco over the latter's declaration of neutrality during the Sudeten Crisis, and an acrimonious discussion over his reluctance to publicize Spain's accession to the Anti-Comintern Pact, which was only brought to an end when the matter was leaked to the press without Spanish approval.

Though they are often overlooked or studied for different reasons, St. Augustine's Cassiciacum dialogues have a subtle yet important political dimension. Much of Augustine's conversation with his interlocutors implicitly hinges on matters concerning political philosophy, as does the very dialogue format Augustine chooses. Yet on the other hand, the focal points of the dialogues are essentially nonpolitical, and some of Augustine's statements can be construed as hostile to civic life and to any thoughtful reflection on the best political order. This essay argues that these apparent inconsistencies are not signs of a contradictory attitude but reveal a three-pronged strategy by Augustine to forge a properly Christian attitude towards political life, a strategy that involves (1) debunking patriotic fervor, (2) inflaming the love of truth, and( 3) re-engaging the civitas from a higher perspective.

In 1873, an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court filed a memorable dissenting opinion. His brethren had upheld a state-granted monopoly against the charge that it violated the new Fourteenth Amendment. The substance of that majority judgment has never been reversed, and it stands today as one of the great milestones in our constitutional law. But the dissent of Mr. Justice Field, though unproductive as to the specific constitutional doctrine he there espoused, is, from another viewpoint, even more noteworthy. For it marks — or we can conveniently take it as marking — the point in our intellectual history at which the democratic strain in the American tradition begins its subservience to political conservatism.

The choice of a date is indeed somewhat arbitrary. A profound change in the national consciousness does not occur overnight, and the revision of the American ideology diat Field's dissent proclaimed was not yet complete in 1873. But Field was a child of his times, and he spoke with the voice of the new generation. His rambling discourse, with its moral overtones, is evidence that a new era in American political thinking had dawned.

Aristotle mentions coercion first in his description of the elements of involuntariness: “What sort of acts, then, should be called compulsory? We answer that without qualification actions are so when the cause is in the external circumstances and the agent contributes nothing.” This statement clearly marks the essence of coercion as exteriority, as opposition not only to the higher degree of interiority, of “from-withinness,” which distinguishes voluntary actions, but also to the spontaneity common to all natural processes. Aristotle gives some instances of physical coercion: a man blown from his path by the wind, and a man carried away by kidnappers.

But we know that psychical forces can also bring about coercion. For example, the movements commanded of a person in deep hypnosis have their origin externally to him in the will of the hypnotist; the hypnotized person contributes nothing by way of voluntary decision to those movements. He is an instrument moved by the external, psychical force of the hypnotist's will; that is, he is subject to psychical coercion.

This paper investigates the Confucian conception of political responsibility as a political virtue essential for an ordinary non-Confucian ruler's actualization of humane government by paying close attention to the early Confucian discourses of Heaven and disaster. After briefly discussing Confucius's seminal idea of responsibility, this paper shows how Mencius developed the political conception of responsibility, as a noncausal responsibility shared by the ruler and the virtuous ministers for a humane government, especially under the condition of natural disasters. It then discusses how the Han Confucian philosopher Dong Zhongshu reformulated the Mencian theory of responsibility and humane government under radically altered political circumstances by advancing a new version of Confucianism, central to which is the causal conception of political responsibility. This paper concludes by discussing how the evolution of Confucian political theory from Mencius to Dong Zhongshu should be understood with a view to the question of political legitimacy.