THE editors of the Review of Politics have asked me to do something that is indicated by the title of this informal essay. It is something that I have long had in mind. Substantially I am asked to assess after the passage of almost twenty years the thesis laid down in The Pragmatic Revolt in Politics. Ordinarily the biography of a book or of a writer's ideas had better, in good taste, be left to others. But I hope that I may be forgiven some notes on the nature of that work, because of their relevance not only to this return to the subject, but because of their relevance as well to what seems to me to be a general change in scholarly attitude toward a central problem: the place of ethics and the place of science in that study which Aristotle named by one word, Politics. It is peculiarly a pleasure to contribute this revision of a position to a journal devoted to the high cultivation of that Aristotelian conception. The distinction already achieved by the Review of Politics is in itself a witness of the changed temper of contemporary thought to a deep concern with political values.

WHEN a new constitution was promised to the Irish people a few years ago, Eamon de Valera, then President of Saorstat Eireann and now Prime Minister of Eire, told his people that it would be written as if England were a million miles away. Apart from the passing phases of Anglo-Irish relations, he wished to remove his constitutional plans from the limitations of contemporary events, to unshackle his mind from the here and the now. How far he succeeded in this effort will be known only in the twenty-first century or the twenty-second. Then, if the new Bunreacht na hEireannhas withstood the slings and arrows of Irish fortunes, de Valera and his advisers will be found to have written not only for their own time but for times to come as they intended.

A medieval schoolman, in a disputation with an opponent, would sometimes pause and say distingue. The making of proper distinctions, however, is no easy task. Man is impatient; he wants to arrive at a conclusion immediately, and he frequently decides with a troubled heart before having given the brain its chance to clarify the issue. On the other hand, if we do take the time “to distinguish,” usually half of the battle is won.

The dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes. History teems with instances of truth put down by persecution. If not suppressed forever, it may be thrown back for centuries.… Persecution has always succeeded, save where the heretics were too strong a party to be effectively persecuted. No reasonable person can doubt that Christianity might have been extirpated in the Roman Empire. It spread, and became predominant, because the persecutions were only occasional, lasting but a short time, and separated by long intervals of almost undisturbed propagandism. It is a piece of idle sentimentality that truth, merely as truth, has any inherent power denied to error, of prevailing against the dungeon and the stake.

When w. s. Gilbert composed this piece of doggerel verse he was scarcely over-simplifying the issue. The Party System had taken its place smoothly within the Victorian Compromise, providing for a change of personalities rather than a change of principles. Not even Mr. Gladstone or Lord Salisbury could go on being Prime Minister for ever, and the mere machinery of government called for a contrast of character as well as a reconsideration of policy. The mimic battles of the great Parliamentary decades responded, adequately enough on the whole, to a dual need—to the human tendencyto differ and the human aspiration to agree. They were the safety valves of our disputes—keeping them, like private jokes, within the family. But when danger threatened, they did not disturb our unanimity.

ALL human society so far as it is Unitas ordinisanswers the same requirements, namely to constitute unity out of plurality under a (formal or unformal) leadership. Wherever one of these criteria is absent, only an aggregation of individuals may ensue; never society.

All human society, therefore, has a constitution whether written or not. This constitution determines who belongs to the society in question, how far its competence reaches, to what ends it is established, how the will of such society is to be formed and executed.

All human society exists in the full stream of life; hence it is never frozen or static. On the other hand, human inertia and vested interests exert their strength by trying to fix the constitution of such society and to keep it, in whole or part, in a given status. Hence, there arises the difference between the real and the written constitution—a difference which both the Conservative von Radowitz and the Socialist Lassalle noticed. It prompted Radowitz’ famous dictum: “A government can efficiently and gloriously rule with any constitution as long as such government wields true authority. Without this authority, rule under any constitution will be bad.”

THE war in Europe and our own declared neutrality make the discussion of this subject particularly timely. Much is being said and written on the question as to what is the best procedure to maintain this neutrality: whether we should retain our embargo on arms or not, and whether if lifted or not, we should demand that cash payments be made by all belligerents who purchase goods from us, and that these goods be transported in vessels sailing under the flags of the nations that purchase them. A point which both parties in the controversy try to make is that if their solution is accepted we shall be less likely drawn into war ourselves. Into the merits of this debate we shall not enter. It is one of practical politics, concerned, not directly with the declaration of neutrality or with its justification, but with maintaining such relations with the belligerents as will best safeguard our national rights and most effectively prevent our being drawn out of our neutral status and into the war on one side or the other. The aim of the present paper is rather to examine the conception of neutrality itself, and under its moral, rather than under its immediately legal aspects. Legal justice is not always synonymous with moral justice, and over-insistence on our legal rights is liable to cause us to forget our moral duties of justice and of charity.

In his address at the 200th convocation of the University of Chicago, June 11, 1940, President Hutchins invited American youth to reexamine the principles which make life worth living.

This enterprise is most urgently necessary in removing the intellectual unpreparedness of the nation. Far worse than the military and economic deficiencies in equipment and armament are the spiritual dissensions among the various groups of our time. In the universal conflict those nations will prevail whose unity results from spontaneous and free devotion to values which are recognized as worth living and dying for. We can reintegrate the nation, when we succeed in breaking the continuous secularization which, parallel to the rapid industrialization after the Civil War, is undermining the ethos of American life. The ethos which made this commonwealth great, was the fighting spirit of enlightenment. The backbone of the political principles of the Constitution, is the spirit of the Christian Law of Nature; that means political freedom as the fullfilment of the rules of the Almighty. This unity between the three spheres: nature, man and God was discarded by the process of secularization. The ethics of enlightenment shifted to the demand for universal comfort and for good living. The attitude of a boundless optimism prevailed which considered history an unending process of perfection. It was thought that this state of continuous improvement would result from the scientific organization of social and political institutions; their progress would eliminate eventually what the less scientific past had ascribed to the finiteness and sinfulness of man.

AMERICAN historians are naturally interested in the question of historical scholarship in the land from which we received the seminar founded by Leopold von Ranke and many other outstanding contributions to historiography of both men and methods; the country to which so many of our scholars owe much of their training in historical research, either through their own work in German universities or through their German-trained American teachers.

WE STAND at the beginning of events of enormous importance. It is too early to form an opinion as to how these events will develop—whether it will be a long-lasting war or if all will be finished when these lines are published—whether other nations and countries will be involved in the struggle besides those who began it, or in other words whether this war will become really a world catastrophe or if it will be relatively localized—which way Chance will turn and what will be the final result of the war? Trying to answer these questions would be mere guess work, without any sufficient foundation. One thing only one might say with entire certainty: it is not a simple war-like episode the beginning of which we witness, it is an event, or rather a series of events of world importance, a. turning point in European history. And in so far as European Culture has become World Culture, the new European War may be considered as a turning point in the life of the whole world.

The race problem is branching out today into so many fields that a preliminary understanding becomes necessary as to the special topic with which the present paper is concerned. Let us first make it clear negatively that the question of the classification of the human races does not come within the scope of this inquiry. The race idea should be distinguished from the race concept which is used in natural science. Furthermore, we are not concerned with the improvement of a given human population through eugenic measures. And, finally we do not intend to deal with the problem of political and social relations between the white and the colored races. When we speak of the race idea we have in mind chiefly the idea as it is used by modern creeds, of the type of National Socialism, in order to integrate a community spiritually and politically.

Theoreticians have always stood in the vanguard of revolutions with programs which were designed to chart the course for nascent political régimes. When the Third Reich was officially ushered in, enthusiastic exponents of a corporative state (Ständestaat) or corporative organization (ständischer Aufbau) were at hand to act as engineers for an uncharted future—in fact, a future which occasionally offered faint glimpses of perpetuity. Some of the corporative “soap bubbles,” as Max Weber once termed them, quickly burst while others remained intact. Some of the bubble-blowers were swept on by the revolutionary forces or they gathered by the wayside to appraise the residue of their theories. In any case, the period from 1933 to the outbreak of the present war has been sufficient to allow for a survey of the corporative developments in Germany in the light of their theoretical background and institutional expression.

IN DISCUSSIONS concerning such problems as labor-time, leisure, unemployment and thefuture of industrial society, it can be noticed that a number of persons become entangled in a net of confusions and sophisms by failing to consider the finalities of work in the right order. In short, we observe that men profit by working because work provides them with the commodities they need; they profit by working, on the other hand, because labor activities secure a sound training of the mind together with a salutary discipline of the appetites. Thus, two lines of results can be ascribed to labor activity. We maintain that they cannot have the same significance in terms of finality. Harmful confusions are to be feared unless we keep in mind their subordination to one another. We have seen, in a previous study, that labor-activity belongs to the category of transitive activities in the strict sense of the word. It consists in a production, in a casual flow, in the emanation of a term, in the bringing into existence of an effect. Moreover, it is essentially, at least in the primary form of manual work, the production of a term exterior to the acting individual. However profoundly the worker may be affected, in his person, by the work he exercises, it is quite clear that the termswhich defines laboractivity is not its immanent, but its exterior result.

Few parts of Bismarck's Thoughts and Recollections have won greater fame than those containing the description of the last meeting between the chancellor and the dying Emperor William I, then nearly 91 years old.

Scarcely two decades have passed since Lord Bryce stated that democracy is universally accepted “as the normal and natural form of government.” What the author of the American Commonwealth regarded at the end of his long life as the result of the modern development had been announced by Alexis de Tocqueville even before Bryce was born. This French historian and political philosopher, who is today classed as one of the most important thinkers of all time, characterized the whole modern political and social trend as an irresistible advance towards democracy. He was afraid that democratic equality would destroy individual liberty. Like John Stuart Mill a generation later, he too was depressed by the fear that the despotism of a brutal majority rule might be a future threat to democracy. But this fear did not change the general trend of his prophecy.

IN A FAMOUS dialogue between the Athenian ambassadors and the Council of the small island of Melos, Thucydides has given the classical statement of the “right” of the stronger. “The brave Milesians soon see that they cannot appeal to the Athenians' sense of justice, because the Athenians recognize no standard but their own political advantage…By making the Athenians justify the right of the stronger through the law of nature, and transform God from the guardian of justice into the pattern of all earthly authority and force, Thucydides gives the realistic policy of Athens the depth and validity of a philosophical doctrine.” The Dutch, in the days of Peter Breughel, used to say: “the big fish devour the little fish” to which Spinoza added “by natural right.” That is the doctrine of the “state,”as inherited from the Greeks. Similar situations still haunt us. Did the Russians by natural right seek to destroy Finnish independence?

Communitarian forms of life are the basic forms in which a people lives. Only in them does man realize to the fullest his being a person—in fact it is only in communitarian forms that he grows to the status of a person. Man's fundamental mode of being is comunio, namely of persons. Such comunio materializes in family life, in friendship, in neighborhood, in religious life, in certain forms of vocational collaboration. Beside these fundamental forms man builds himself free-willed associations which do not engage his personality to its deepest and fullest extent, as e.g. trade unions, corporations, societies and associations for cultural, scientific, recreational purposes. For want of a better term we call them in contradistinction to the other forms societarian forms, in following the terminology of F. Toennies in his book Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (Community and Society). Both these forms develop in a people and aid in constituting a people. However, the communitarian forms are basic and therefore of greater importance for the totality of a people's life, its political institutions included.

This article may be considered as a continuation of such preceding studies as have been published by the author on the question of the constitutional order in the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics. But this time the author has deemed it expedient to change the method adopted in his former writings, in studying Soviet constitutional law. Had the old method been applied, it would have been sufficient to give a juridical analysis of the principal event in the development of Soviet constitutional law in the course of these last years, which was the promulgation of the latest Constitution, of June 11th, 1936, and also the constitutions which were elaborated on a similar basis and promulgated in the different Republics forming part of the U.S.S.R. But it will scarcely be found adequate to apply strictly juridical methods to such political bodies of a recent type where the text of the constitution and, in general, all written law, very often serve only propaganda purposes, intended to disguise the real relations existing between the rulers and the ruled.

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.