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.

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.

Tocqueville's account of judging unites two concerns separated in recent debates over constitutional interpretation, use of discretion to serve the rule of law and respect for tradition. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey the majority upholding Roe is properly concerned with rule of law, while Justice Scalia properly criticizes departures from text and tradition. However, both evince a skepticism which undermines these concerns. This raises differences between American constitutionalism prior to Holmes and the rival strains of legal realism now dominant. Tocqueville's judicial statesmanship would perpetuate the Constitution by preserving the principles of its letter and spirit. Holmesean judges lack the classic common law basis of this jurisprudence and should not exercise discretion unguided by our founding principles. The jurisprudence of individualism yielded by activist Holmesean skepticism is inadequately opposed by Holmesean skeptical restraint and better addressed by a common law constitutionalism.

On the second of May in the year 1808, an event took place in Madrid which was to be of momentous consequence not only in the history of Spain but of revolutionary and Napoleonic France as well. As the last of the Spanish royalty departed from the capital for Bayonne and exile, outraged feelings gave way to an armed uprising against French rule. The revolt was speedily crushed by Murat's troops, but despite the grave restrictions imposed by his order of the day, Spain refused to be quieted. Juan Pérez Villamil, fiscal of the Supreme Council of War, issued a call to arms: “The country is in danger. Madrid is perishing, a victim of French perfidy. Spaniards, hasten to save her. May 2, 1808.” The response was immediate; irregular bands of troops sprang up, mob violence was visited upon those accused of being afrancesados (that is, pro-French), and many officials paid with their lives for their apathy in organizing the resistance. Everywhere was heard the cry of the patriots, “i Viva Fernando VII y mueran los franceses!” A few months later the regular Spanish armies were to administer to the troops of imperial France their first defeat. At last the principle of nationalism, so long a vital force in the success of the French revolution and Napoleon, had been turned against France.

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 latter half of the eighteenth century was a period of tremendous social, political, and economic fermentation. Much of our contemporary civilization was shaped by the forces released during those five decades. Frenchmen, Englishmen, and Germans of great ability and deserved renown had written and were writing of the rights of man and of the citizen. More than ever before in the history of the modern world thought was being given to the lot of the common people. In America, and later in France, Thomas Paine epitomized this liberal intellectual trend in words that have been adopted as classic expressions of the inherent value of the human personality.

Unfortunately, the phenomenal growth of industrial capitalism during he nineteenth and twentieth centuries caused the new bourgeois ruling classes to lose sight of the basic human values stressed so emphatically by the eighteenth-century intellectuals.

Kant is regarded as one of the staunchest advocates of retributive punishment in the modern tradition. This essay makes the case that a careful reexamination of Kant's account of punishment is necessary, especially in light of liberalism's characteristic inability to give the powerful moral appeal of retribution its due. Kant attempted to provide a clear analysis of what we mean when we say that morality demands that punishment be “proportional” to the crime. According to Kant, punishment's retributive aspect—as distinguished from its deterrent or restorative effects—is primarily concerned with redeeming (negative) moral worth. This paper attempts to unpack this claim by examining Kant's discussions of judicial punishment, the conscience, and divine punishment, respectively. It concludes that as a result of serious unresolved difficulties in his arguments for retribution, Kant manages only to deepen the question of the morality of retribution rather than to give it a decisive answer.

In Nietzsche's early and late writings, he appears as an antimodern, antiliberal political revolutionary, championing the world-transformative characters of (first) Richard Wagner and (later) Zarathustra. By contrast, in the writings of his “middle period,” Nietzsche struck up a rapprochement with the modern world, and developed the ideal of a “free spirit.” Among those writings, The Wanderer and His Shadow sheds the most revealing light on the free spirit ideal. It shows that, even as Nietzsche sought to avoid some of the hazards associated with his more revolutionary writings, he continued to advocate a sharply critical engagement with political and cultural life. And it reveals what Nietzsche understood to be most challenging or problematic about the free spirit ideal—and, thereby, what later moved him away from it.

The account of law in Plato's Minos is on its surface strange. Law is both what “wants to be the finding out of what is” and “the finding out of what is.” It is a faculty in us like sight or hearing, and its stability requires that it be independent of us. It makes universal claims but always does so for a particular people in a particular place. Law must be grounded in what is beyond the law, and yet, once established, must assert its own final authority. Lawgivers must be at once above the law, almost a different species from those for whom they legislate, and, like everyone else, subject to the law. These ambiguities, indeed duplicities, are not so much defects of law to be resolved as indications of its fundamental nature. What follows is an account of this dual nature, especially in its necessary connection to poetry.

Many people today are concerned about the implications of climate change for their personal reproductive decisions. Some have transformed such concerns into activism by engaging in a “birth strike” and publicly announcing their decision not to procreate because of climate change. This article draws on Hannah Arendt to examine the political meaning and significance of birth strikes. It makes three basic points. First, by highlighting the human condition of being born, what Arendt called natality, birth strikes have illuminated a distinctive set of threats and possibilities for climate politics. Second, due to modern consumerism and instrumentalism, which Arendt saw as the dominance of labor and work over action, birth strikes have been misperceived as advocating a reduction in personal carbon footprints and global population growth. Third, birth strikes have clarified some of the challenges for efforts to link the individual and collective dimensions of climate responsibility.

During the past fourteen years, since the entry of the United States into the Second World War, and especially since the end of the war (with its disillusioning peace blending into the so-called cold war), the United States has had thrust upon it the problems of the overwhelming difficulties of world leadership. Leadership in the true sense of the word cannot be totalitarian or authoritarian. It must be intellectual, moral and spiritual. This our leading statesmen have sometimes recognized, though not, I am inclined to think, often enough. In any event, it is in these spheres that our peoples have been perhaps the least prepared for our mission. Even in the natural sciences, one of the principal creative sources of American leadership has been individual scientists—such as Einstein, Fermi and Teller—bom and trained in Europe, who found asylum in the United States from Nazi or Fascist tyranny. In so far as the creative mind and its place in the national life are concerned, our main weakness has not been, however, in the natural sciences. During the first half of the twentieth century in the United States these have become distinguished in their own right. When it comes to the practical application of science we have led the world. In no other country have the results of new scientific knowledge been utilized technologically to produce as high a standard of living, measured in material quantity, as in the United States.