Centralization and decentralization have been applied in Germany not only to geographical relationships between levels of government and to hierarchical relationships within levels of government but also to hierarchical relationships between levels of government. American-style dual federalism is not a part of the German administrative tradition. Subnational units in Germany have traditionally been responsible for implementing the laws of larger units. With the creation of a German federal state in 1871, the Prussian system became in large part the German system of administration. Today there are five levels of administration in the Federal Republic, and strong parallels can be drawn to the earlier Prussian traditions. In spite of the institutional arrangements for decentralized administration and local self-government, there are complaints about the alleged lack of opportunities for popular participation and overcentralized decision-making. These complaints raise difficult questions concerning the requirements for national standards and equality on the one hand and local citizen demands on the other.

The excessive entanglement standard is part of the Supreme Court's three-pronged test for determining the constitutional validity of government aid to religion. This article challenges in turn the validity of that standard and its two components, namely the criteria of administrative entanglement and political divisiveness. The administrative entanglement criterion is flawed because it violates the principle of equality. The political divisiveness standard, on the other hand, not only misreads the intention of the Founding Fathers but also ignores the value of religious conflict in a democracy and the strategy for handling such conflict proposed by James Madison.

Since its publication, Eichmann in Jerusalem has provoked a storm of controversy. With a few exceptions, critics reacted to the substance of Arendt's thesis with considerable bitterness and hostility. This article argues that her detractors badly misunderstood Arendt because they were insufficiently conversant with, or unaware of, her political theory. Fundamental to this theory, articulated at length in her The Human Condition, is the crucial distinction between the public and the private. None of her critics, including those who sympathized with Arendt, have understood that her critical analysis of Eichmann's conduct and of the response of the Jewish leadership to the tragic fate that befell their people makes sense on the peculiar terrain of her political theory and particularly in terms of the public-private distinction which lies at the core of this theory.

This article critically examines the widely accepted thesis that because of basic theoretical differences between Hamilton and Madison the Federalist is best read as the product of a “split personality.” An examination of the areas and concerns identified by leading proponents of this thesis (Douglass Adair and Alpheus T. Mason) fails to reveal any significant differences between Hamilton and Madison writing as “Publius.” In fact, this analysis reveals a very close correspondence in their views on the basic principles of the proposed system. These findings strongly support the proposition that the Federalist is a consensual work whose contradictions and tensions reflect more basic difficulties endemic to the proposed system and principles of republicanism rather than theoretical differences between its authors.

In this essay Montesquieu's reflections on international politics are interpreted as a more-or-less coherent whole rooted in his understanding of the structural changes in European history from antiquity to the eighteenth century. Montesquieu's study of history led him to recognize a new context for European politics—a regular system of relations among independent states dependent upon the development of commerce. The expansion of commerce engendered a mutual dependence among European states which opened new possibilities for international politics. A cosmopolitan vision of mutuality, embodied in principles of international law and justice, could replace the power politics of drives for universal monarchy. Furthermore, commerce implied the possibility of a revival of republics, although based not on the political virtue of classical republics (unattainable by modern Europeans in Montesquieu's view), but on the formal justice of fairness and contract.

Hannah Arendt's political theory gains in clarity and resonance when it is placed in the context of German phenomenology and Existenz philosophy. In this essay, the authors examine the points of contact (on the level of ideas rather than personal ties) between Arendt and Martin Heidegger. The argument holds that Arendt followed Heidegger in grafting traditional humanism onto an untraditional, self-consciously antimetaphysical body of thought. Yet almost from the beginning, she struck out in a direction peculiarly her own, seeking to escape a certain contemplative aloofness and remoteness from public affairs which she sensed in Heidegger's fundamental ontology. Against Heidegger, Arendt tried to show that the core values of human rights and dignity cannot be sustained unless one explicitly recognizes the “plurality” of human life and the importance of the public realm in revealing who we are as individuals.

The Soviet Union confronts grave needs for reform because it achieved impressive progress upon old foundations, struggles with a systemic economic slowdown, faces fundamental social and spiritual infrastructured problems, wrestles with a costly overextended empire, and must adapt to the age of knowledge that challenges its centralized control. Soviet leaders recognize the need to restructure the economic and political system, but they consider innovation an ideologically unacceptable hazard to its values, and its control. Change would threaten the primacy of the military share of economic resources, the high priority foreign policy receives to provide legitimacy, and control of Eastern Europe. Only corrections and minor repairs in the economy are likely in a system that lacks a reform mechanism.

In this paper Althusser's concept of overdetermination is examined from two distinct but related perspectives. The first is the more empirical aspect. Althusser uses this concept to explain the relation between the Marxist “base” and “superstructure.” While Althusser has made a novel and perhaps even profound contribution to Marxist theory, his explanation stumbles on an unresolved tension between the twin principles of the determination “in the last instance” by the base and the “relative autonomy” of the superstructure. The second aspect is the more philosophical. If the concept of overdetermination is correct, it can only be so because the self has been dissolved into a set of social relationships in which there is no room for such traditional human attributes as free action, purposiveness and responsibility. The result renders meaningless the search for any permanent core of the self which is thought to define our common humanity. It is this second theme which makes Althusser one of the most powerful postmodern critics of the Western humanistic tradition.

Despite its enduring appeal, the republican vision of political life has been the subject of numerous recent criticisms. Both its relevance to an age of large-scale organizations and its desirability in an era which professes concern for individual autonomy has been questioned. However, a reconsideration of these challenges to republicanism suggests that they can be effectively met without sacrificing the core values of republicanism. Consequently, by adapting it to contemporary political realities the republican ideal can in fact serve as an apt antidote against many current political ills. Admittedly, though, any form of republicanism that is going to be viable today will assume a character at odds with either republicanism's classical or commercial modes.

Ancient traditions have stressed the intervention of the gods and contemporary moralists picture God as being on their side in international conflicts. Pharisaism, Manichaeism and the morality of progress are other distortions of political ethics. The first step in a more profound understanding of the ethical dimension of diplomacy is a clear-eyed view of the good and evil in human nature informed by philosophy and history. However, differences exist among political realists and international lawyers who have examined human nature in these terms. Some emphasize the relevance of ethics for international politics while others question it. Democratic foreign policy poses special problems for those who discuss international morality. Such issues are resolved at least partly within the tradition of practical morality which the article considers in conclusion.

This paper focuses on Pascal's controversial pronouncements on justice, force and law. It proceeds, in light of a preliminary examination of historical context, questions of textual interpretation, and Pascal's method and study of man, to show in Pascal's thought a theory of law which (a) rejects rationalist and naturalist explanations, (b) incorporates positivism and by implication what is today called “historicism,” and (c) transcends both positivism and historicism dialectically in a Christocentric biblical view of cosmic order.

When discussing citizenship Rousseau insists on the primacy of instrumental and discursive reasoning, whereas when discussing patriotism he accords primacy to intrinsic reasons of sentiment. The essay explores the different meanings of the two concepts and points to their inherent tension as well as to the possibility of their coming into conflict. It finds that Rousseau, evidently doubting the adequacy of instrumental reasons as explanations or justifications of political commitment, tends to elevate intrinsic sentiment above discursive rationality. Implicit therefore in Rousseau's position on patriotism and citizenship, the essay concludes, is not merely the potential of a dual theory of political willing and political rationality but also the potential of a threat to rational discourse as a mode of determining and accounting for political action.

Two months before the Bolshevik Revolution, Felix Cole, a 29-year-old clerk at the American Embassy at Petrograd was promoted to vice-consul at frigid and remote Archangel. As the Allies, in the spring of 1918, began to advocate military intervention in North Russia, Cole came to a far different conclusion. In his view economic aid to the North, especially in foodstuffs, would do far more to maintain Allied influence than the use of force. However, Ambassador David R. Francis and his foreign service colleagues abruptly dismissed Cole's warnings against military intervention as being unworthy of serious consideration. Tragically for the 222 Americans who died in the resulting Anglo-American military expedition to Archangel, Cole was ignored when he predicted: “Intervention will begin on a small scale but with each step forward will grow in its demands for ships, men, money and materials.”

Lot is a possible alternative to election as a democratic means of selection. The prime historical instance of its political use is classical Athens. Lot was an important expression of the Athenian democrats' commitment to equality, more egalitarian than election which assumed equality of opportunity rather than desert. Lot also had certain important political effects, such as reducing factionalism and maintaining the authority of the assembly. It helped to make the Council and the courts representative cross sections of the assembly. Election, however, was preferable when important decisions were to be entrusted to only a few people. In modern democratic societies, lot is not uncommon as a distributive device but is rarely used for selecting political officials. Election remains more democratically efficient for large polities, but lot could be seriously considered in communities which approach the small size and intimacy of the Greek city-states.

This study examines the ideological and truth-seeking aspects of Ackerman's Social Justice in the Liberal State. Ackerman begins in a truth-seeking fashion by requiring all power and all distributive claims to be justified. In developing principles of social justice from imaginary dialogues that are assumed to be neutral toward the good, he defends the “neutrality principle” inadequately and employs it ideologically. The fundamental distributive principle, undominated equality, is derived from dialogues that are manipulated to prevent other principles from passing the “neutrality test.” Although Ackerman discusses issues of citizenship and birthrights that are ordinarily ignored, his attempt to protect the liberal state leads to ideological formulations.

The work of Eric Voegelin is primarily to be understood in relation to the problems created by the modern civilizational disorder. They are the problems that not only motivated his original search for order in man, society and history, but also determine the new directions in which his inquiry continues to move. This essay first traces the principal stages through which his thought acquired progressively more adequate instruments for a theoretical penetration of the nature of the modern disorder. Second, it examines the alternative vision of order that has correlatively emerged as the appropriate remedy in the course of this diagnostic analysis. Finally, it attempts a critical evaluation of the efficacy of Voegelin's critique as a response to the simultaneously spiritual, intellectual and political crisis of the age. In particular his reluctance to regard Christianity as the answer to the anxieties at the root of the modern disorder is explored at some length.

An important strand of the republican tradition warns that liberal education harms republics by promoting aristocracy, breeding an idle and skeptical class of philosophers and undermining the civic virtues on which republics depend. The American Founding generation, in its writings on education, rejected this warning and maintained instead that the open cultivation and wide dissemination of liberal learning is favorable to republican government, if not essential to its very existence. The aristocratic tendencies of liberal education would by mitigated by the diffusion of knowledge. Philosophy would show its usefulness by increasing man's power over nature and multiplying the conveniences of life. The republican virtues would be strengthened by the elucidation of their rational ground.

Ironically shortly before and after Lincoln proclaimed emancipation, the Great Emancipator received as much criticism as praise for what he did or did not do. This article examines how the 1861 award-winning L'Abolition de l'esclavage by Augustin Cochin helped persuade Americans and his fellow Frenchmen that the abolition of slavery was both morally and practically right. Cochin, the empirical moralist, had a deeper appreciation of Lincoln than many of the President's critics—on both sides of the Atlantic. The article also offers new material and insights on the relationship between French and American liberal thinkers during the Civil War.

Contrary to those social scientists who posit a close relationship between corporate interests, the capitalist state, and the nonpartisan research establishment, this paper challenges the linkage thesis through an examination of the early history of the Brookings Institution. As the nation's oldest and most prestigious “think tank,” the Brookings Institution played a multidimensional role in the public policy process. Robert S. Brookings, the capitalist who founded the institution in the aftermath of World War I, played little role in the subsequent history of the institution. Instead, the less reform-minded professional social scientists who staffed the organization shaped the character of the institution. In their defense of the market economy, Brookings economists emerged as leading opponents of the new liberal state.