When there is a crisis of the conscience, the natural human response on the part of many churchgoers is to put a little something extra into the collection plate on Sunday. That is roughly what the nation did in 1957 when it created the Commission on Civil Rights.

Just three years previously the Supreme Court, in Brown, had invalidated the old separate-but-equal rule. Some of the southern states had resolved to resist the decision with all their might. Civilrights groups had countered by mobilizing for a fight that would last longer than they expected.

Perhaps the only undeniable blessing to evolve from the recent troubles in Northern Ireland has been miniboom in the publishing industry. Seldom have so many, written so quickly, on a subject understood by so few—and turning, one assumes, a decent profit for their effort. Traditionally contemporary modern Ireland has attracted the occasional coffee-table volume or the nearly annual The Irish, potted “sociology.” Until quite recently, few scholars have ventured into contemporary affairs—those events after the revolutionary years of 1916–1921—and almost none of the tools of social science have been put to use on Irish society. Thus the latest commentators found a truly virgin field, bereft of valid experts, congenial to anecdote, fashionably violent, amusingly Irish and if not fit for the coffee table certainly attractive in the market-place. The result has been a twofold outpouring: first of those who would chronicle in print what had been for the British audience nightly fare on the television and second of those more committed or more daring who would interpret, analyze, explain and predict. The former, however ill-prepared, sought to write history, however superficially, while the latter sought to make it by rearranging the past to buttress their vision of the future. Neither the observers nor the participants have in print as yet produced a single definitive work nor in fact a very satisfactory plain tale of events—much less a revelation into the nature of the conflict in Northern Ireland. The attempts of this first wave to date, however, offer some insights into the Northern Ireland problem, into the nature of Irish and British scholarship and, perhaps, into the future that awaits the most distressful Six-counties.

Reforms usually spring from felt or threatened grievances, not from abstract considerations of institutional perfection. It is understandable then that Presidential election years regularly bring a renewal of more than ordinary interest in reforming the way the President is elected. Interest in reform of this kind was more widespread and intense than usual before and after the 1968 election. Changes have already been made in certain phases of the nomination processes of the major political parties. Nevertheless, the constitutional provisions and the laws governing the Presidential election itself remain unchanged. In 1969 and 1970, these provisions and laws were almost swept aside by a proposed constitutional amendment providing for direct popular election of the President.

The concept of the “generation gap,” like so many notions used to explain the present dislocations in society, has gained wide currency because it is a fundamentally soothing idea. To troubled adults it conveys the implication that the alienation between themselves and their children is a wholly natural phenomenon, inevitable and therefore healthy. It relieves the parent from the need to worry. For the rebellious young themselves the term has ideological uses, again through the implication that what they do is natural and normal, inevitable and desirable.

A Radical who argues is an uncommon sight; even more uncommon is a radical who likes to argue with nonradicals. To participate in radical political dialogue, one usually has to be committed to a specific social cause and perhaps even to a “dialectical logic.” One of the fascinating and challenging aspects of Robert Paul Wolff's recent books is that he draws his radical, anarchosocialist conclusions from premises that are quite acceptable to the average nonradical, in a style that is free from flirtations with a higher logic. In this sense Marcuse and Wolff could not be further apart.

During a 1957 Notre Dame conference entitled “What America Stands For,” Karl De Schweinitz, Jr., examined the “contemporary problems of the American economy.” His major themes should be familiar: the effect of concentration of power and production on the functioning of the economy; the instability which the economy exhibits from year to year; and the continuing tension in the economy between individual preferences and economic imperatives.

As Great Britain passed into the second half of the nineteenth century, she stood on the thresholdof universal manhood suffrage. Precedent for reform had been set in 1832 but in many ways the soul-searching which culminated in the Reform Bill of 1867 was much more traumatic. Rule by a hereditary aristocracy had been weakened in 1832. Narrow suffrage based on property, nevertheless, preserved the principle of elitist rule. Because of this, Parliament was more of an “equalitarian aristocracy” than a modern democratic institution. The system seemed more rational after 1832 but Parliament still represented “property and intelligence” and the political position of the vast majority of people remained unchanged.

The study of international relations has passed through a series of intellectual controversies. These have included the debate between political realism and political idealism and the debate as to whether international relations is a distinct discipline or the subject matter of several other disciplines. Now the discipline is debating appropriate methodology. Proponents of a traditional approach and proponents of a scientific approach both contend for their particular methodology.

In any Discussion of American community life two beliefs are likely to quickly come to the fore. First, that we have over the last 50 years undergone a revolution in community settlement patterns and today we are an urban nation with more and more of our population crowding into our urban areas. Many now speak with disdain about the runaway urbanization and the emerging “ant-hill society.” A second theme that almost always accompanies the first is that the quality of life in our urban communities is deteriorating rapidly. One can hardly read a daily metropolitan newspaper without spotting a headline which sounds the alarm. Not long ago, for example, the New York Times had a front-page spread with the startling headline, “Eleven Mayors Warn Here of Collapse of U.S. Cities.” Stewart Alsop, in a Newsweek column with the foreboding title “The Cities Are Finished,” managed in the course of one page to inform his readers that the cities may be “finished” because they have become unlivable; that the net population of cities will continue to fall; that the future is statistically predictable—in another 10 years most of our cities will consist mostly of blacks; and that the cities will come to resemble reservations for the poor and the blacks surrounded by heavily guarded middle-class suburbs. More recently, Sol Linowitz, Chairman of the National Urban Coalition, declared, “We have abandoned our cities … [and while they] are not on fire today, most of the conditions that caused the civil disorders in recent years have worsened.”

It has long been recognized that interest groups, formed in many cases for nonpolitical ends, have manifested an almost “inevitable gravitation toward government.” Truman has noted that modern industrial life involves disruptions of social equilibria established in an earlier and simpler era, and that interest group leaders, in an effort to restore some degree of social balance, turn to government as a mediating agent.

In an era of profound social change, when all aspects of national and international life are under scrutiny and review, it is vital that successes and failures in international scientific and educational relations be examined. The most dramatic success story in recent times may be the cooperative programs in agriculture that have led to the “green revolution.” The history of this remarkable effort can be measured against the criteria of the development of cooperative solutions to urgent “human species problems” and of building indigenous capacity through the training of leaders. If it is true that the core of international cultural relations is the purposeful exchange of knowledge and skills, especially knowledge and skills that can be used toward solving problems affecting the entire world, agricultural program can also be measured against this standard.

Announcement of the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine by Soviet spokesmen in 1968 has been widely regarded in the West as a development marking a new epoch in the evolution of the world communist system. The Doctrine has been commonly viewed as a Soviet response to the exigencies of Great Power politics in circumstances of continuing loss of revolutionary dynamism or as a reaction to the threat to Soviet hegemony in its inner bloc posed by uncontained polycentrism, or both. Much attention has been devoted to the concept of “limited sovereignty,” with this concept being treated as the heart of the Doctrine and as evidence of a major new departure in the Soviet approach to world politics. This assessment, interestingly enough, is generally favored both by Western analysts and by anti-Soviet spokesmen within the world communist system.

The conferences, the spectaculars of European diplomacy between the First and Second World Wars, have contributed some interesting myths to the folk history of the twentieth century. The Munich Conference of 1938, for example, has come to represent to some an act of betrayal, surrender and defeat—an effort to have one's own skin by selling out a small country in a vainattempt to satisfy a dictator's unlimited appetite. The Locarno Conference of October, 1925, has been regarded as an event which brought an end to the conflict between Germany and the Western powers during the World War and its aftermath. Supposedly, at Locarno enemies were reconciled after years of hostility, and a new era dawned: the following four years were a period of harmony between Germany and the West, as foreign ministers from each side conducted personal diplomacy in an atmosphere of good will. These assertions about Locarno have received less scholarly attention than the myth of Munich and deserve critical reexamination. As part of that reconsideration, some measurement might be taken of the level of misunderstanding and malevolence and hope — either genuine or illusory.

It has often been pointed out that the Messianic creeds and extremist ideologies of our century represent the displacement of traditional by radically new world views. Similar and no less dramatic reconstructions of reality, implicit and explicit, are reflected in modern man's movement, evidenced most clearly since the Second World War, toward secular humanism. The purpose of this article is to explore some of the implications, both secular and religious, of this trend, and to delineate what seem to be the most conspicuous characteristics held in common by the new world views that have emerged. In doing so I must acknowledge considerable indebtedness to the preliminary explorations of several contemporary writers, notably Eric Voegelin and J. L. Talmon.

When I was an undergraduate I could never understand the reluctance of a historian to analyze in print the happenings of the most recent 20 years. To my mind that reluctance was best exercised with respect to events and societies thousands of years ago. For those ancient societies we might have fragments, clues, a few sketchy outlines. But for the years immediately preceding our own we had literally mountains of material in newspapers, books, periodicals, and of course our own personal memories and on the spot analyses. After reflecting back on my own assessment of things in that year, the spring of 1963, in which I was literally a sophomore, I understand more fully the reluctance of the historian. In understanding the immediate past we are implicitly claiming to understand the present and the future. Almost none of my perspectives about the future, based on my “understanding” of the then recent past, turned out to be correct even in broad outline.

Aristotle's ancient biographers adduce several reasons to explain why in the year 367 B.C. the young Stagirite, who at the time was 16 years old (or in his seventeenth year), went to Athens, or was brought there by his “guardian” Proxenus. According to one tradition, he moved there because of the advice given by the Delphic oracle. Ibn Abi Usaibia relates that, in keeping with some ancient reports, “this happened because Proxenus and Plato were close personal friends.” We do not know, however, whether Usaibia's explanation is based on historical fact, nor are we able to ascertain the ultimate source of this story. Naturally, it might always be maintained that young Aristotle went to Athens in 367 B.C. for the purpose of securing the best education available in the Hellenic world, particularly, since by that year the fame of Isocrates and that of his school of rhetoric (and, judging from Pseudo-Plato, Fifth Epistle, perhaps that of the Platonic Academy) must have reached Macedonia.

To invoke the word “naturalism” is reminiscent of American philosophy of a past generation that under the interdict of Neo-Hegelianism sought a reconstitution of metaphysical attitudes, expressed in terms of Pragmatism and Critical Realism. But these naturalistic philosophies have, in a sense, come and gone, the philosophical mainstream being subsequently dominated by varieties of Positivism and continental European philosophies stemming from Existentialism and Phenomenology. It is curious, in a way, that, with one notable exception, most of these more contemporary philosophical movements presume some type of naturalistic base, at least to the extent that they reject the issues of conventional metaphysics and elect to deal, in various ways, with what they construe to be present actualities. The “notable exception” is clearly Logical Positivism that makes a radical separation between the scientific and philosophical enterprise.

Culture, in the simplest language, refers to the thoughtways, feelingways, and actionways of a people, be they a nation or a subsociety. As a concept, it refers to the established orientations which a people has for managing its relationships in the collectivity and its relationships to the forces and conditions of the physical environment. The key elements of culture are beliefs, sentiments, norms, and values. Almost all behavioral scientists would include in the realm of culture all the cognitive, affective, behavioral, and value orientations shared by a people. With these basic elements of culture, a people constructs complexes which we call ideologies, social structures, institutions, organizations, laws, and policies.

This work is the issue of love and egoism. In 34 years of teaching at Notre Dame I have fallen in love with learning, teaching and that place and fellowship of learning and teaching, the University.

Its permanence seemed so evidently desirable that the Notre Dame Foundation's epic fund-raising successes appeared to be the laborious fulfillment of a historical necessity.