When the Potsdam declarations were made public, Anne O'Hare McCormick (in her column in the New York Times of August 4, 1945) commented: “The scale and novelty of the great experiment is breathtaking. Stalin, Truman and Attlee may be remembered longer than the original Big Three, the war-leaders, because their names are affixed to this document.”

The general public, on this side of the Atlantic, is as yet hardly aware of the full implications of the Potsdam declarations. The economic consequences of Potsdam have been widely debated in Britain, but they have received little attention in this country. Yet, the plan decided upon in the former city of the Prussian kings is due almost entirely to American initiative. In the words of Raymond Daniell:

Although Castiglione's The Courtier was one of the most popular products of the Italian Renaissance, it has largely escaped the attention of modern political theorists. Many dismiss The Courtier as an apolitical work characterized by nostalgia and escapism, but it should not be so dismissed: on the contrary, Castiglione's book expresses a definite political program. This essay explores that program as a “politics of the second best”—as a pragmatic response to unfortunately diminished political opportunities. Put simply, given the choice between trying to make one's master a better person, on the one hand, and not having a master at all, on the other, surely one would not opt for the former unless the latter was not available. Reflection on this point informs the debate between proponents of “negative liberty” and those of “republican liberty.”

Much of what states do in the international system they do as a response to their perceived obligations, commitments, or responsibilities. Not all of these obligations are owed to the same sort of recipient, however: some may be owed to other identifiable parties with whom one has arrived at a bargain or an exchange of benefits, but obligations may also be owed to a chosen rule of conduct or guide to action, as in the case of deterrence, and to oneself, as in the case of selfpreservation or one's sense of honor. All three types of international obligation have been recognized in international law and practice, but no one of the three categories encompasses all the duties of states. A complete understanding of international relations requires attention to all three parties to which international obligations may be owed.

This article examines the discussion among Russian scholars and activists concerning the principles of political liberalism in Soviet Russia during the Gorbachev era (1985–1991) and in independent Russia during the Yeltsin presidency (1991-present). After a review of the emergence of liberalism during the Gorbachev years, the analysis focuses on three models of political liberalism which have emerged in the context of Russian postcommunist state construction. Each competing model of liberalism—statist, rule of law, and social—offers a different vision of the principles of political liberalism and the strategies necessary to institutionalize liberalism as the foundation of the postcommunist polity.

“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.

The question of national identity has been a central theme in Mexican thought since the Revolution of 1910. The writings of Octavio Paz, one of Mexico's most prominent literary figures, are an important and provocative locus for this question. The contribution of Paz to an analysis of Mexican identity must be seen in the broader context of an intellectual revolution in Mexico. This began in the late 1920's and was directed against the prevailing philosophical romanticism represented by Antonio Caso and Jose Vasconcelos. This was, in part, a protest against the anti-intellectualism inherent in an “aesthetic-intuitive” approach of these writers. But it was also the demand for a philosophical perspective more relevant to an emerging Mexican nationalism already being articulated in literature and art. The writings of the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset were of crucial importance in influencing Mexican philosophy towards realism. The key concept taken from Ortega was that of “historical perspectivism”: the view that reality cannot be grasped independently of the point of view from which it is being observed. Perspectives do not distort reality; they constitute it. Philosophy, then, is changed from something abstract and eternal to something concrete and historical. Ortega's historical perspectivism became the inspiration for Mexican thinkers who wished to develop a national philosophy and a concept of “Mexicanidad.”

ToUnderstand the limited accomplishment of American Catholic intellectual activities in the second half of the twentieth century it is not sufficient to examine the immediate antecedents. The American Catholic history since the beginning of the first World War has, indeed, witnessed important efforts to raise Catholic intellectual activities to the level of traditional European Catholic culture, but these efforts have been handicapped by a bad starting point. The absence of similar efforts during the decades preceding World War I — a period in which Catholic intellectual activities were seriously out of step with the intellectual development of the United States — has much to do with the present mediocre status of Catholic intellectual activities and accomplishments. Unfortunately, the period in Catholic history between the Americanist controversy and the formation of the National Catholic War Council in 1917 has not been seriously studied and consequently its effect on subsequent American life is not fully understood.

The “rule of reason” remains after almost forty years the most curious obiter dictum ever indulged in by the Supreme Court of the United States. Mistaken though it was in its basic assumptions, the rule nevertheless persists as the Court's standard for construing the Sherman Act. This is not to say, as some critics have said, that the rule has seriously hampered the Department of Justice in enforcing the antitrust laws. We have it on the authority of Thurman Arnold that without the rule die Sherman Act would be “unworkable … because every combination between two men in business is in some measure a restraint of trade.” The rule, he has said, “has the effect of preventing the antitrust laws from destroying the efficiency of diose combinations that are actually serving, instead of exploiting, the consumer.” The fact remains, however, that in adopting the rule the Court erred in at least two respects: first, in applying a test of reasonableness where in the early cases at least none was called for and, second, in basing that rule on a misunderstanding of the common law. For the first of its sins the Court has been scolded many times; for the second, it has received surprisingly litde criticism.

WHEN looking over the immense literature devoted to laborproblems by philosophers, moralists, economists and sociologists, the philosophically-minded reader cannot help being struck by the fact that these writers, for the most part, abstain from defining what they intend to designate by the terms work, labor, worker, and workman. When any definition is given, there is small likelihood that it may meet the elementary requirement of embracing all the defined object and only the defined object. This current deficiency of studies on labor, although worth noting, is not particularly astonishing: everybody knows that the most familiar realities, those with which we are ceaselessly concerned in our daily life, are exceedingly difficult to express in the form of a logically satisfactory definition. In that connection, the so-called Socratic dialogues of Plato are full of profitable lessons. As soon as the persons are asked to define virtues most commonly spoken of, they become entangled in a net of contradictions, and sometimes the dialogue comes to an end without bringing forth any conclusion.

Political scientists refer to the comparison of various governments as being the field of comparative politics. Within that category, those that deal with less-developed countries are said to be specialists in political development, a term that has long been controversial due to its value implications. But within this political development category, there is a strong tendency for scholars to either specialize in a specific country and/or a specific set of countries. The sets are generally geographic, so among political scientists one can be a Latin Americanist, an Africanist, and so forth.

InSpite of a continued gradual increase of American-Soviet contacts, the official Soviet image of the United States in 1959 was shaped, as before, largely by a combination of preconcert tion and contrivance. The massive Soviet machinery of communication continued to present to the peoples of the Soviet Union a picture of America based less on empirical judgment than on the application to changing circumstances of unchanging attitudes. As in the past, the Kremlin's image of America and of the West in general appeared to be as much an instrument for the manipulation of foreign and Soviet public opinion as it was a reflection of Moscow's appraisal of international political forces. The official doctrine of irreconcilable struggle between Soviet “socialism” and Western “capitalism” held undiminished significance for the rationalization and legitimization of Kremlin power and policy.