Every Court is the product of its time, reflecting predilections of fallible men in black robes. While wearing the magical habiliments of the law, Supreme Court justices take sides on controversial issues. From John Marshall to Warren Burger, the Court has been the guardian of some particular interest and the promoter of preferred values. Thus judicial activism, of whatever orientation, involves a paradox at the heart of constitutional orthodoxy—the Supreme Court considered as the mouthpiece of self-interpreting, self-enforcing law.

My direct experience with the Bulgarian aspect of the interallied rivalries following the Second World War extended from the planning of postwar policy in the Department of State in 1943–44 through the first year (1944–45) of American participation in the implementation of the Bulgarian armistice.

Contemporary Augustinian scholarship is distinguished among other ways by its emphasis on Augustine's alleged contribution to the development of the modern notion of history. Except for a few sporadic references to a possible theology of history in the City of God, one finds little in the literature of the nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries to indicate that the content of that work might be of particular relevance to the problem at hand. The same is not true of the post-World War I period, which witnessed a sudden surge of interest in this hitherto neglected subject, to such an extent that there has scarcely been a major treatment of Augustine's thought written since that time which does not dwell on it at considerable length. Augustine, Langdon Gilkey has recently asserted, is “the father of the historical consciousness,” the first author to exhibit an awareness of the fundamentally historical character of human existence, the only early Christian writer to have brought the whole of history within the compass of a “purposive unity.”

Innumerable are the works of history and political science which treat of the relations between only two peoples. This is, after all, rather surprising, for international life is complex and multilateral, and it can readily be asked what right one has to isolate such purely bilateral relations. Isn't this a bit artificial? If we compare individual human beings with nations, we note that the former live in social groups, and each of them knows an appreciable number of persons outside those groups. Nevertheless it is sometimes useful to study the privileged relations which exist between a husband and wife, between two friends, between two adversaries, between a minister and his principal collaborator. Let us start from the principle that such studies can help us to understand better both man and the society of man.

The politics of the Union de la gauche dominated the 1977–78 French legislative campaign and the postelection analyses. Undeniably, one of the most intriguing subjects during this period was the strategy of the French Communist party (PCF), its evolution over the previous decade and its apparently conflicting objectives. It wasn't at all obvious, for example, that the Communists wanted to win the elections. Did the PCF deliberately reject the possibility of governing under conditions which it presumed it could not control because of the superior electoral strength of the Socialist party (PS)? This interpretation was widespread in the French and American press after the elections and, of course, was favored by the Socialists. Or was the PCF as dedicated as ever to a democratic transition to socialism through a communist-socialist coalition? Georges Marchais, the party's secretary-general, insisted this was the case before the election returns were in.

Among influential writers in the field of political development and comparative politics in the last two decades few have excelled Samuel P. Huntington. With a prudent economy of basic concepts, Huntington has addressed a variety of political problems in many different kinds of societies. His work has been germane to the issues of power and morality, revolution, stability, violence, corruption, participation, and, above all, the political implications of social change. In a challenging and encyclopedic manner, Huntington has managed to relate his ideas to the experiences of Africa, Asia, Latin America, Europe, and the United States, enriching the conceptual insights of diverse area specialists and providing interesting theoretical linkages for seemingly very different and singular social and political worlds. Acknowledging all this, one nevertheless may (and this writer would say “must”) question the basic premise of Huntington's understanding of politics: both theoretically and practically.

The epics present actions of men rather than theories of politics. Epic political accountability thus will not be found as a political idea but in an action which the people take or might take that brings them into a tense and potentially disastrous confrontation with their leaders. One such confrontation demonstrating popular accountability in the Odyssey will be analyzed, and a major speech in the Iliad will be examined to determine the importance of popular accountability in epic polity.

In recent years, several writers using the new political economy or public choice approach to political analysis have sought to improve our understanding of bureaus, bureaucrats and governments and, in some cases, to suggest ways in which their behavior might be “improved” in the public interest. The public choice approach to public administration rejects the so-called sociological or traditional political science approaches with their alleged Parsonian, Weberian, Marxist, historical, institutional or organic biases and limitations in favor of an individualistic, deductive, noninstitutional analysis, which is thought to be more cogent, more fertile in testable hypotheses, more genuinely theoretical and more relevant in terms of reform. Here the view is taken that the pathos of the public choice approach to public administration consists in this: that public choice advocates by virtue of their methodology are fated to “lose” consistently on questions of administrative reform and prescriptive efficacy, even while contributing, potentially importantly, to the scientific understanding of nonmarket, usually public, organizations or “bureaus.”

My object in this paper is to compare two texts in the history of ideas which are, on the face of it at least, very different from one another. John Henry Cardinal Newman's Development of Christian Doctrine remains one of the classic expositions of an evolutionary thesis; T. S. Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions already ranks as a near-classic statement of a revolutionary case. The contrast is, I think, not quite as stark as may appear at first sight: though Kuhn writes of revolutions, his concern, no less than Newman's, is nevertheless with “development”; and though his subject matter is the history of science, his concern too is, or once was, with “dogma.” What I most want to stress, however, is not this verbal correspondence, which may as it stands be intriguing rather than convincing, but a series of substantive parallels which flow from a mode of argument common to both these texts: the extensive use of political imagery in defining the structures of ideas in question and in explaining the character of their history.

The ultimate aim of political theory is to disclose the meaning of political activity. As such, political theory is, at one and the same time, interpretive and evaluative. In the phrasing of Dante Germino, political theory “takes as its starting point the empirical fact of the existing human person in the totality of his experience as a creature in society.” But, of course, the meaning of “the empirical fact of the existing human person” is a topic of philosophical inquiry. Facticity is not a given. It is an issue of paramount importance. On the resolution of that issue, much depends. According to Whitehead, “theories are built upon facts; and conversely the reports upon facts are shot through and through with theoretical interpretation.” The notion, for instance, of “history devoid of any reliance on metaphysical principles and cosmological generalizations, is a figment of the imagination.” The task of political theory therefore cannot be undertaken apart from considerations of cosmology. It is at this point that process thought is relevant to political theory. And that, in general, is the topic of this article.

Just when the equation of republican government with liberal representative democracy had finally taken hold in the academic community, a new group of scholars began to emphasize the differences between them. Drawing upon the writings of earlier republican theorists, they argued that republican government traditionally depended upon political participation and virtue to preserve freedom. In contrast, liberal democracy relied upon representation and self-interest, both of which undermined the civic spirit of the community.

For two hundred years the United States, with its theory of the separation of powers, has presented a compelling argument on behalf of presidential government. In contrast to the parliamentary system alternative offered by Great Britain, the American credo posits that the surest preventive against tyrannical rule lies in the deliberate parceling out, rather than concentration, or fusion, of political power. Proof of its validity, insist proponents of the separated powers doctrine, has been demonstrated on numerous occasions, even—nay, especially—in times of national emergency.

I propose to examine the relationship of American democracy to the Third World along two planes of reality, one briefly sketched in outline and miniature, the other drawn with greater elaboration and substance. The brief sketch sums up all that follows; it draws on America's great leader, Abraham Lincoln, who prophetically defined the issues that faced both the young American republic and today's fledgling nations by asking the question:

Must a government of necessity be too strong for the liberties of its people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?

Wallace K. Ferguson, the noted Renaissance scholar, once wrote that history must be seen through the eyes of the one writing it. He went on to say that, “since history is in this sense created by the historian, and he, in turn, is the product of his age and environment, history varies from generation to generation and must be constantly reinterpreted.” It is with this thought in mind that we will undertake a reexamination of the role of the Arctic in Canadian-American relations.

In recent years the Arctic has become a region of growing significance for both the United States and Canada after decades of marginal interest bordering on neglect. It is this article's position that Canadian foreign policy, concerning the Arctic regions to the north of her mainland, has consistently from 1880 to 1970 been based upon a perception of potential threats, which in fact never existed. Furthermore, such a perception has been based in part upon the unsettled nature of international law in the Arctic and the effect of certain environmental factors, labeled as domestic sources of foreign policy in Dale Thomson and Roger Swanson's Canadian Foreign Policy: Options and Perspectives. The article, then, shows how Canadian foreign policy in this issue-area illustrates the Sprout's paradigm of perception in decision-making. According to this paradigm, “what matters in policymaking (and, of course, in analysis thereof) is how the human policymaker (or group) perceives, interprets and responds to the environing conditions and events.”

During the 1950's and 1960's, Utopian thought, like ideology generally, was deemed to be at an end. Typically, Judith Shklar pronounced that “the urge to construct grand designs for the political future of mankind is gone,” basing her judgment on the ground that “the last vestiges of Utopian faith required for such an enterprise have vanished.” Even more recently, and correspondingly less perspicaciously, Paul Seabury expressed the view that “a Utopian concern for ‘world order’ as a planned qualitative transformation designed to meet new needs seems to have been washed out. … Prescriptive futurism now seems passé. In the event, such obituaries have turned out to be premature: thought about world order reform has experienced a resurgence during the 1970's, to such an extent that we might be tempted to equate the intellectual mood of the present time with the Utopian impulse of the post-1918 decade.

During his lifetime (1858–1932) Graham Wallas's pioneering contributions to the study of politics were widely acknowledged. Thus, his Human Nature in Politics (1908) was rightly acclaimed as a turning point in British and American political science, away from the study of political institutions and toward the study of political behavior. With his later works, notably The Great Society (1914), Our Social Heritage (1921) and The Art of Thought (1926), Wallas's influence spilled over into other fields of social inquiry provoking a chain of serious debates among the pundits of various disciplines. And the term “Great Society,” by which Wallas meant a complex, mechanized industrial society, the monster-child of the Industrial Revolution, became a household phrase in the 1930's among the New Deal liberals in the United States, where, according to historian Samuel Eliot Morison, he had been the most influential English political philosopher since Herbert Spencer.

A close examination of early and modern American constitutional interpretation reveals that there has been an essential change in the manner in which the Constitution is interpreted. When that comparison takes the form of a comparison between very early Supreme Court decisions and very recent ones the difference is relatively clear—at least that there is a difference. To some extent, what some of the differences are is observable. For instance, the overt balancing of interests (those of state and individual) in modern civil liberties cases is quite different from the character of earlier Supreme Court decisions.

The American states experienced an extraordinary political transformation in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. For more than a generation state governments had stimulated economic development by subsidizing agriculture and industry, investing in private enterprise, constructing internal improvements at public expense or lending the public credit for such purposes, and granting special privileges to private companies. By the mid-1840's, however, the states had begun to assume a more passive role. Accompanying this withdrawal from economic activity and associated with it was a general restructuring of state political systems. New state constitutions, the most visible evidence of such change, lowered suffrage requirements, stripped legislatures of the appointing power, and extended the elective process to more state offices. They also curtailed legislative authority in economic policy areas by prohibiting certain types of activity; requiring general incorporation laws in place of special charters; establishing detailed procedures for managing state debts and public works; and, in some instances, mandating specific policy actions.

The legitimate goals of political communities and the proper objectives of law have been themes of political philosophy since its inception. Philosophers' disagreements about the nature of political life and law have occasioned divergent accounts of the best or ideal government and have generated an even deeper controversy as to whether the best case should be the measure of political phenomena in the first place. For the purpose of analysis, three kinds of political theories can be distinguished. Characteristic of the first kind is the belief that people can attain a wide range of excellences and that the function of a political community is to foster in a direct manner the best or most complete form of human excellence, regardless of how rare the individuals who profit from this guidance. Accordingly, a central concern of “idealistic” or “utopian” political philosophy is elaborating the nature of the absolutely best political order and the conditions of its emergence. Among the central activities of governments so conceived are moral and intellectual education, as presented, for example, in the works of Plato and Aristotle. A second kind of political theory shares the belief in a multiplicity of hierarchically ranked human ends but denies that the highest possibility for human development should serve as the foremost principle determining political institutions and governing political decisionmaking.