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.

The classical theory of totalitarianism provided unequalled insights into the nature of the Stalinist system. Its prevailing interpretation, however, proved grossly inadequate to conceptualize and explain the changes of the post-Stalinist period. Because of this, there appeared a strong tendency to reject the “totalitarian model” and, in addition, to discredit it politically, as serving the aims of the cold war. The present article tries to show that emphasizing the importance of changes did not require a wholesale dismantling of the totalitarian theory. On the contrary: the notion of totalitarianism should be preserved as an ideal-typical construct, adequately explaining the militantly ideological phase in the development of communism; the evolution of the system in its postideological phase should be explained as detotalitarization, that is, essentially, as a disintegrating process, paving the way for the so-called collapse of communism. The author analyzes the consecutive stages of the detotalitarization process in post-Stalinist Poland and thus explains the collapse of Polish communism not as a sudden, miraculous change, but as the last link in a long chain of events. He rejects the view that Polish People's Republic was “totalitarian to the end” as having no theoretical justification at all—although still being useful in the political struggle against postcommunist forces.

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.

An increasing concern for the place of religion in global politics in the past decade is reflected in the work of William Cavanaugh, a political theologian coming from the radical orthodox movement of the Roman Catholic tradition. Taking aim at key tropes in international relations, Cavanaugh introduces a strong critique of the legitimacy of the state and against its martial attitude. This review questions the historicity and generalizability of Cavanaugh's analysis. It also challenges Cavanaugh's exaltation of the church from both an internal and external perspective. Finally, it considers the expanded role of the state as compared to Cavanaugh's vision of the martial state. By way of conclusion, it questions the extent to which Cavanaugh provides an alternative to consigning religious groups to civil society or a workable role for Christian engagement with global politics, even though he provides us with a strong critique of the state.

Most scholars agree that Frederick Douglass was a liberal—he was committed to individual rights, toleration, limited government, and self-reliance. Wilson Carey McWilliams deviated from this view by suggesting that Douglass's experience as a slave led him to appreciate human interdependence and reject liberalism in favor of fraternal communitarianism. In this essay, Douglass's response to the problem of slavery is examined in order to demonstrate that both the liberal and the fraternal readings are correct. Douglass's aims were undoubtedly liberal, but he thought these aims could only be realized in a community of individuals who felt strong obligations to one another. As a statesman, Douglass was confronted with the challenge of convincing free people that they ought to care about those who are enslaved. My aim here is to explore how he met that challenge and with what consequences for how we think about liberal statesmanship.

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.

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.

In several key passages in Thomas Hobbes's understudied translation of Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War, Hobbes's Pericles directs audiences to distrust rhetoric in favor of calculative self-interest, inward-focused affective states, and an epistemic reliance on sovereignty. Hobbes's own intervention via his translation of Thucydides involves similar rhetorical moves. By directing readers to learn from Thucydides, Hobbes conceals his own rhetorical appeals in favor of sovereignty while portraying rhetoric undermining sovereignty as manipulative, self-serving, and representative of the entire category of “rhetoric.” Hobbes's double redescription of rhetoric is an important starting point for an early modern project: appeals that justify a desired political order are characterized as “right reason,” “the law of nature,” or “enlightenment,” while rhetoric constituting solidarities or publics outside the desired order is condemned. Hobbes's contribution to this project theorizes rhetoric as a barrier to individual calculations of interest, placing a novel constraint on political life.

The arrest, trial and sentence for life of Joseph Cardnial Mindszenty, Primate of Hungary, has profoundly shaken the conscience of the Western world and provoked a wave of protests on a scale unheard of before. The incident occurred at the climax of the tension between West and East. The figure of the Cardinal became the personification of a world-wide struggle between two fundamentally different conceptions of life. His broken resistance—both physical and psychological—symbolizes the fate of the millions oppressed and silenced by a ruthless Communist minority in East Europe. The recntations and self-contradictory confessions in the course of the trial had all the characteristics of the usual travesties of justice in Communistdominated countries. Pope Pius XII rightly stated in his allocution of February 14, 1949, that the behavior of Cardinal Mindszenty “appeared an accusation not against himself but against his very accusers and condemners.”

Despite common portrayals of Ahab as beyond the pale of common humanity, Melville offers much reason in Moby-Dick to regard Ahab as a reflection of ordinary American political life. Two of Ahab's most definitive characteristics—his isolation and his desire for domination—do not differentiate him from the other characters in the book but rather underscore how much he is like them. Among the Pequod's crew in particular, those traits are the rule rather than the exception, a fact that helps to explain why the crew members are so quick to adopt Ahab's way of thinking: in large measure, it is already their own. Along these lines, looking at Ahab as a representative American man makes it possible to better understand Melville's true anxieties about the prospects for democratic flourishing in the United States.

The article first examines the ways in which Richard Neustadt's Presidential Power attempts to connect the activities of power-seeking presidents to the public ends their actions presumably further and then discusses what is problematic in these linkages. The critique focuses on the defects in Neustadt's concept of the “grain of history,” the diminished sense of public purposes revealed by the standard of “viability,” the difficulties in evaluating presidential actions with the criteria developed and the ways in which the failed linkage between the means to power and the ends served undermines Neustadt's own teaching. The paradoxical quality of Presidential Power, in which insightful analysis of the means to power is combined with unsatisfactory discussion of the purposes for which that power is to be employed, is seen as possibly rooted in Neustadt's tacit acceptance of positivist and historicist views, which are now increasingly called into question. The article contends that those concerned with the separation of the normative and the empirical begin efforts to reconnect presidential power to public purpose by going beyond the terms of Neustadt's argument and by reexamining the American Founding for what it may suggest about the intended ends of politics and the presidency.

Carl Schmitt's constant denunciation of political compromises has received little attention. This omission is damaging in two ways. On the one hand, it misses a central aspect of Schmitt's political thought. On the other, it deprives those interested in discourses challenging the legitimacy of compromise in democracy of a valuable source. In this article, I systematize Schmitt's multifaceted grievances to compromises, especially as expressed in the 1920s and early 1930s. If the Weimar Constitution is fertile soil for observing and contesting compromises, the Third Reich constituted, for Schmitt, a paradigm reversal on this subject, as it managed to rid itself of pluralism and compromises. Schmitt has been portrayed as an authoritarian populist: the systematic reconstruction of his critique of compromise allows for a finer elaboration of the points of convergence and divergence between his democratic theory and populist views of democracy.

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.

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.