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.

It is said by some observers of politics and foreign policy that morality has nothing to do with the vital issues of national and international politics. Experienced practitioners note that seldom if ever are moral issues invoked in serious policy discussions; politics and foreign policy are a practical art in which interest and power prevail. Others take issue with this view claiming that from its history America has derived a high responsibility unique among states to stand for certain moral ends and purposes. From its history it has been a nation set apart; its place in the world is dependent on faithfulness to its founding creed embodied in the Declaration of Independence and other statements down to the Atlantic Charter.

Mortimer J. Adler's much quoted address in which he castigated American professors has been Widely misunderstood. When he declared that their errors were more dangerous than the threat from Hitler, he did not intend to discount them. On the contrary, he was paying a most impressive compliment to the importance and effect of their writings and other activities. Adler is professor of the philosophy of law in the University of Chicago, and his yardstick must be applied to himself. It would be inappropriate to pass over his How to Think About War and Peace in silence or to regard it as an unimportant and uninfluential work. This new book, praised as a product of hard thinking, will be read only by few, even though it will be bought by many in response to the intense propaganda of the publisher.

The legitimate goals of political communities and the proper objectives of law have been themes of political philosophy since its inception. Philosophers' disagreements about the nature of political life and law have occasioned divergent accounts of the best or ideal government and have generated an even deeper controversy as to whether the best case should be the measure of political phenomena in the first place. For the purpose of analysis, three kinds of political theories can be distinguished. Characteristic of the first kind is the belief that people can attain a wide range of excellences and that the function of a political community is to foster in a direct manner the best or most complete form of human excellence, regardless of how rare the individuals who profit from this guidance. Accordingly, a central concern of “idealistic” or “utopian” political philosophy is elaborating the nature of the absolutely best political order and the conditions of its emergence. Among the central activities of governments so conceived are moral and intellectual education, as presented, for example, in the works of Plato and Aristotle. A second kind of political theory shares the belief in a multiplicity of hierarchically ranked human ends but denies that the highest possibility for human development should serve as the foremost principle determining political institutions and governing political decisionmaking.

Is There a philosophy behind what we call Nazism? Humanists addicted to progress will resent this question as a sacrilege against the dignity of the human spirit. H. J. Laski seems to speak from the heart of the majority of anti-Nazis by refusing to look at Nazism and Fascism as anything else than a spiritless system of oppression in the service of monopolistic capitalism.

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.

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.”

One of the constant worries of the United States, since the role of a dominant world-power has been thrust on her, is the situation of Latin America. Relations with Canada require thought and preoccupation but they produce no deep concern. Canada and the United States understand each other and they form their policies in terms of friendly adjustment. Yet the same is not true when we consider the bloc of nations stretching to the south of the Rio Grande. They form two thirds of the geographic stretch of the western hemisphere, and they constitute a population equal to ours. The dependence on Latin America on the part of the United States in her capacity as an international power is evident. What is not evident is the way to make our friendship with our southern neighbors a more stable thing than the fragile arrangement which confronts us in the present.

Thomas Paine's social-contract theory, which asserts the protection of individual rights as the sole end of civil society and the consent of the majority of individuals as the sole source of government's authority, may seem to be better suited to the democratic Constitution of the United States than Edmund Burke's theory of prescription of government. Burke's theory is based on the rational moral goals of civil society, not on the supremacy of the people's or any other will. It asserts that the natural ends of society are prior to rights as Paine and other radical democrats conceived of them and that natural obligation is prior to and controls consent. Burke can therefore afford us a more realistic interpretation of popular consent and of the Constitution as the political form that makes us a people. He also offers a useful corrective to the currently popular view of the Supreme Court's function as being primarily to protect an ever-expanding array of constitutional rights. Burke was no democrat but he may help democrats to overcome the limitations of the liberal contractarian model of society.

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.

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.

One of the many subjects that await careful research at the hands of students of political thought is a critical evaluation of recent socialist thought in India. In this paper only a few of the significant aspects of the subject can be touched on; it is hoped that this will stimulate detailed work on it.

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.