Since 1947 the major foreign policy of the United States government has been containment. This policy of creating situations of strength which would prevent the extension of Communist power and influence in the world was first proclaimed in the Truman Doctrine (March 12, 1947). The policy had been anticipated in 1946 when the battleship Missouri visited Turkey and some forty Mediterranean ports. In the course of this display the Missouri was joined by two aircraft carriers, seven cruisers, and eighteen destroyers. The early sensitivity to Soviet threats to the Middle East and its approaches, revealed in the Doctrine and that naval demonstration, was not consistently maintained at this time or later. Perhaps, indeed, American foreign policy only operates with fullest energy, when directly confronted with a serious Soviet threat. At any rate, it may be argued that for the period 1946–1955, when the Soviet Union was neither conspicuously active nor influential in the Middle East, United States policy contributed little to the solution or easing of the area's all but intractable problems. So to describe the problems is to propose a good excuse, but they were the problems, and, unfortunately, they did not wither from neglect or incantations.

Negotiation, the essential activity of diplomats, is an important phase in the process of shaping and executing foreign policy.* “Il faut négocier, négocier et toujours négocier,” suggested Talleyrand. Sir Harold Nicolson has even expressed the wish that the word “negotiation” be substituted for the word “diplomacy” because of the disagreeable flavor of the latter to many people. Success or failure of foreign policy is greatly influenced by the skill of negotiators, whose behavior can be more important for the course of history than is generally recognized. The skill of a negotiator, however, is determined not only by personal ability, but, more importantly, by the total political context, domestic and foreign, within which he operates.

The phrase, “science and freedom,” as it is used nowadays, is aimed at an enemy position.* The enemy not only denies science's freedom in theory, but also jeopardizes, confines, destroys it in practice.

If this enemy position is to be approached in an attempt at an intellectual confrontation, rather than assailed with a mere “demonstration” (the remarkable change of meaning that this word has undergone is a matter closely related to the theme of this paper) it is necessary for the enemy position to be understood, not just in its present form, but also in its basic foundations. Only then can a clear notion be reached of what sort of an argument is needed by way of an answer, and how strong it must be, if it is to meet the enemy position squarely, at the most telling point.

The intellectual life is neither committed to Christianity nor does it antecedently reject it.* That it is not committed to Christianity is clear enough from history. Plato, Aristotle, Archimedes, Moses Maimonides, Ibn Sina and Einstein were not Christians but no one would deny that they were scholars. That the Christian can be a scholar is just as plain. Abelard, Aquinas, Copernicus, Galileo, Erasmus, Newton and Newman were Christians and no one would deny that they were creative intellectuals.

The political history of France, as usually recorded, appears to be a conflict of parties, ideologies and ideologists: liberals against conservatives, royalists against republicans, and radicals against politicians of moderate tendencies. The Marxian conception of history has fortunately contributed to directing scientific research toward economic factors which might explain the attitude taken by this or that social group in certain circumstances, or might account for the progress of some parties in a specific region. Yet, research in that direction does not appear to have achieved any sensational discovery: to reduce all political history to a struggle between the “haves” and the “have-nots” is oversimplification and does not account for the disconcerting complexity of political strife in nineteenth century France.

It is well-known that the teachings of Marx and Lenin struck a response among those generally referred to as intellectuals. Among their most enthusiastic supporters in the countries which subsequently fell to communism may be found a long list of prominent writers, artists, scientists, even educators. Some of them, to be sure, were guided by sheer opportunism, jumping on what they took to be a band-wagon, but more joined because of misguided idealism. Some succumbed to the professed communist concern for the underdog and the inflated promises of better social justice; others wanted to register their protest against real or imaginary defects in the system under which they lived. Still others thought to uncover in the deterministic messianism and the apodictic claims of the Marxian Weltanschauung a safe-conduct through a world made uncertain by the awe-inspiring impact of modern technology with which liberal democracy seemed to be unable to cope.

The age of nationalism offers us many examples which prove that affinities in descent or language have no influence on the formation of modern nations or on their political ideas. Switzerland is only one of several Germanic lands which developed a nationalism resembling much more closely that of England rather than that of Germany. The case of the Low Countries is similar. Both were until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries politically and historically a part of the German Empire. Both grew into separate nations in border regions where Germanic and Latin civilizations have met since the beginning of European history. Both gained their national character by a process of intellectual and political emancipation from Germany. The Dutch historian, Jan Huizinga, affirmed in Berlin at the beginning of 1933 in a lecture on the Netherlands as mediator between Western and Central Europe that “Our whole history as a people and a state is, with a few exceptions, Western European history. Our relations with the West have conditioned our independence as a people and as a state. Be it as friends, be it as enemies, France and England were our teachers. The Netherlands have significance and a meaningful place only as a territory oriented toward the West.”

Africa, an area of contrasts and contradictions, is beginning to assume new importance in Western eyes. Its more than 200 million people, in many stages of economic and political evolution, are evincing a new vitality and demonstrating a growing consciousness of Africa's place in the modem world. The rapid changes on this vast continent are most fully reflected on the political plane. Since World War II, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, the Sudan, and the Gold Coast (Ghana) have become independent states. Former Italian Somaliland, Nigeria, and Uganda are taking uncertain strides in that direction. France is offering the hope of a new political future to its remaining African possessions. In addition, new and modern cities have been carved out of jungles, diversified skills imparted to Africans, and the values of a scientific age made more comprehensible.

If burma has needed to prove its right to be considered genuinely neutral in world affairs, it clearly did so in the first weeks of November 1956. At a time when it was engaged in crucial negotiations with Red China over Chinese incursions into its border territories, Burma chose to go on record in the United Nations and in the councils of the uncommitted Asian nations strongly condemning Russian aggression in Hungary along with the British, French and Israeli aggression in Egypt. Despite this, Burma to date has managed to hold its own in the Chinese negotiations.

The origins of modern democracy are so closely bound up with the history of liberalism that it is a matter of considerable difficulty to disentangle them and to distinguish their distinctive contributions to the common political tradition of modern Western culture. For this question also involves that of the relation between the three revolutions, the English, the American, and the French, which transformed the Europe of the ancien régime, with its absolute monarchies and state churches, into the modern world. Now all these three revolutions were liberal revolutions and all of them were political expressions of the movement of the European enlightenment in its successive phases. But this movement was not originally a democratic one and it was only in the second half of the eighteenth century that the democratic ideal was clearly formulated. On the continent of Europe the revolution of ideas preceded the political and economic revolutions by half a century, and the revolution of ideas was not in any sense of the word a democratic movement; it was the work of a small minority of men of letters who looked to the nobles and the princes of Europe rather than to the common people, and whose ideal of government was a benevolent and enlightened absolutism, like that of Frederick the Great or the Empress Catherine of Russia. There was an immense gulf between the ideas of Voltaire and Turgot, of Diderot and D'Alembert, and the opinions of the average man. The liberalism of the philosophers was a hothouse growth which could not be easily acclimatized to the open air of the fields and the market place.

All national security systems have their methods of keeping track of subversive activity. No doubt a certain number of members of subversive organizations are also police agents, and no doubt a number of police agents are also members of subversive organizations. This is as likely to have been as true of Tsarist Russia as of anywhere else. Certainly the penetration of police agents into the revolutionary movement and of revolutionaries into the secret police was carried to such lengths that in a number of well known cases it was impossible to tell whose interests were being served by certain individuals. In this article I describe four such cases—E. F. Asev, organizer of the assassination of the Russian Minister of the Interior in 1904 and of the Grand Duke Sergius in 1905; Father G. A. Gapon, the priest who led the procession of workers on “Bloody Sunday” in 1905; Bogrov, the assassin of the Russian Prime Minister in 1911; and R. V. Malinovsky, who was leader of the Bolsheviks in the Duma from 1912 until 1914.

The tide of events is increasingly pushing away those stereotypes which depict Africa as a continent of passive, ignorant men and of primitive socio-political organization. “Host to a variety of social, economic, and intellectual stimuli, Africa finds its destiny directed into new and uneasy patterns,” one student has observed. “Such a process is a challenge to Western political practice and belief. Can the content and structures of democratic popular government serve as a medium of reintegration for the many peoples of Africa as they seek to modify their activities and their aspirations in the light of modern practice?”

Up to this writing, the late John Dewey remains by all odds our most influential American philosopher of education, and it is a long time since any other individual of any nation has had so much influence on educational theory and practice at home and abroad. He is also one of our most influential philosophers in general, and this in spite of the fact that young men are not now espousing his philosophy. An obvious fact about him is that he is characteristically American: he is a meliorist and reformer, an experimentalist, energetic and resourceful, and, as it were, a born pioneer and frontiersman. He is impatient, always in a hurry, wanting to get a lot of things done, sure that to change things is to better them, and committed to change as integral to being if not its very core. “To be,” he said, “is to be in process, in change.” In all these matters central to Dewey, his thought is remarkably conventional. We are like Dewey in many of these things, or Dewey is like us.

In the midst of the European Revolution of 1848, T. B. Macaulay offered the classical Whig explanation for England's immunity to it. England needed no revolution in 1848 because it had had its own safe and sane revolution of 1688, climaxed by that masterpiece of political wisdom, the Whig settlement. Without wholly superseding this distinctly Whig interpretation of England's stability in the midst of Europe's mid-nineteenth century cataclysms, Elie Halévy has supplemented it by pointing to the stabilizing influence of the Methodist-Evangelical Movement.Macaulay and Halévy overlooked one important element in Britannia's ability to rule the waves of revolution. It is an element somewhat repellent to liberal-minded historians, both in its nature and its source. For one of the factors in England's stability was the growth of a xenophobic, anti-revolutionary, nationalistic spirit and it was closely connected with anti-Catholicism. This anti-Catholicism was fostered and given direction by the Conservatives between 1832 and 1845, at which time it split that party wide open over the issue of the grant to the Roman Catholic Seminary of Maynooth in Ireland, as it had sixteen years earlier over Catholic Emancipation. The remarkable success of the Conservatives in rallying Englishmen to the anti-Irish “no-Popery” standard has been obscured by the traditional view that the period 1829–1848 saw the triumph of the liberal ideology, beginning with Catholic Emancipation, passing through the Reform Bill of 1832, and culminating in the Repeal of the Corn Laws.

Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920), a self-styled “Christian Democrat” who dominated two generations of Dutch political history, has received passing mention rather than scholarly examination outside the Netherlands. Ernst Troeltsch, speaking of Kuyper's theological work, called him a key figure in the development of modern Calvinistic thought. And Michael Fogarty mentions Kuyper's influence in building “one of the most successful, and in many ways the most instructive political, economic and social movements to be found anywhere in the Christian world.” But, apart from such brief notes, there is little. We propose in this article to sketch Kuyper's career and summarize the ideas with which he attacked Liberalism.

Hobbes did not believe in ghosts. The old sceptic pointed out that ghosts always appear fully clothed—and the idea of the resurrection of a dead man's old clothes is really preposterous. But the ghost of Hobbes himself has haunted Europe for the last three centuries. Dr. Richard Peters, whose cool and pithy survey of the main compartments of Hobbes's thought was published last year,* obviously feels a wry affection for this tough old ghost where others have felt alarm and horror. The posthumous career of Thomas Hobbes at the hands of his enemies, critics, and commentators reveals a good deal about him and still more about them. Hobbes's system is like a big irregular diamond each of whose facets has brilliantly reflected the changing light focused on it. To examine the changing reception of Hobbes's ideas is one way—an eccentric but, I think, an enjoyable way—of looking at the larger changes in the intellectual climate of Europe during the last three centuries.

The Leveller movement of the Puritan Revolution was composed chiefly of people who represented economically the lower middle classes and religiously the Independents and the Sects. Thus, they had a respectable basis, though their enemies claimed otherwise, and while. they were interested in certain political reforms which appeared sweepingly radical for their times, they did recognize the value of a visible church organization (not a state supported church) and the necessity of such fundamentals of English life as the sanctity of property and the existence of government.

Out of what is sometimes called the dream world of pretenders have come some of the freshest, most common sensical political writings of contemporary France. Indeed, the doctrines advanced during the last twenty years by Henri, Comte de Paris (born in 1908), heir and pretender to the French throne, have earned him the epithet of “Revolutionary Prince.” To the many paradoxes of modern France must be added that of a pretender who has better understood the fundamental prerequisites of successful democratic government than many of the traditional Republican leaders.

Twelve years have passed since Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his bunker at Berlin. Since then a number of aides and associates have published their memoirs, but on the whole the literature on Hitler has been surprisingly meager. Some of those who could have told us more about him did not survive him long enough to do so, while few of the survivors were articulate enough to set down their recollections in writing. Nevertheless among recently published reminiscences dealing with the Fuehrer a few do contain data that are new and significant. Taken together with the Proceedings of the Nürnberg Trials and the records of his informal table talks, they cast some additional light on that sinister and elusive figure.

The history of world politics of the half century before 1914 is full of nationalist wars, imperialist conflicts, and the diplomacy of the armed peace. To the less spectacular developments of internationalism so little attention is usually paid that the League of Nations almost seems to emerge full-grown from the head of Woodrow Wilson. It is true that the dominant trend in the relations between the sovereign states was anything but pacific, and the peoples were increasingly swayed by the emotion of aggressive nationalism. At the same time the world was becoming more interdependent economically and culturally, and there was a quiet but clearly perceptible growth of international-mindedness. A significant expression of this development was the movement of ideas in the eighteen-seventies which led to the establishment of two important law societies, the Institute of International Law and the International Law Association. The story of their origins is an interesting chapter in the history of international law and throws light as well upon its relationships with the organized peace movement.