During the 1930s and 1940s, many Japanese intellectuals resisted Western cultural imperialism. This theoretical movement was unfortunately complicit with wartime nationalism. Kitaro Nishida, the founder of modern Japanese philosophy and the leading figure of the Kyoto School, has been the focus of a controversy as to whether his philosophy was inherently nationalist or not. Nishida's defenders claim that his philosophical “universalism” was incompatible with the particularistic nationalism of Japan's imperialist state. From the standpoint of postcolonial critique, it is argued that this defense is insufficient. Philosophical universalism is not in itself anti-imperialist, but can in fact contribute to imperialist ideology.

In this article, the venerable but still not entirely resolved issue of Hegel's relationship to liberalism is discussed. In contradistinction to recent communitarian accounts, the Kantian and Enlightenment idea of rational freedom in Hegel's political philosophy is shown to be the basis for Hegel's critique of traditional liberalism. While the Hegelian state incorporates most of the rights and freedoms ordinarily associated with liberalism, Hegel's rationale for these rights and freedoms is never the traditional liberal one. In conclusion, the relevance of Hegel's ideal of the rational state to our understanding of contemporary liberalism and its discontents is assessed.

Political science is uncomfortable with collapse, given the discipline's reliance upon stable political institutions and the presumably thick soup of political culture in which they stand. Even after Barrington Moore's classic study of revolution, the lingering question of Why did the state collapse when it did? troubles those who failed to anticipate profound change; but this rarely inhibits the accusation that ideological opponents made an even poorer job of prediction. In this respect the last six years in the study of Russian politics have been very lively.

The driving forces of modern society—whether economic, technological or nationalistic—do not encourage a very strong sense of citizenship. It is a notion that is either taken for granted, systematically devalued or simply ignored. But we are beginning to realize that this weak sense of citizenship may be at the root of many of our social pathologies. Social theory is increasingly making a noticeable and not insignificant effort to include citizenship theory. The volumes here under review testify to the fruitfulness and indeed energy of this effort. They range widely and do not present a unified picture.

As East Asian societies struggle with the implications of modenity, the degree to which their Confucian heritage can support institutions of liberal democracy has been much debated. Recently, several authors have argued that the nations of Confucian Asia are indeed modernizing, but in the direction of “illiberal democracy”, which they see as an approach to democratic practice that takes communitarian concerns like social solidarity and political virtue into greater account than other, more liberal democratic societies do. In line with that argument, this article makes an introductory comparison of classical Confucian and contemporary communitarian thought, criticizes the view of Confucianism as necessarily authoritarian and suggests that Confucian theory and practice provides a strong and in many ways unique communitarian response to liberalism, without fundamentally invalidating those humanistic principles basic to democratic reform.

John Hilton, Noel Reynolds, and Arlene Saxonhouse have employed statistical authorship analysis to claim that Hobbes authored three anonymously published works. But the authors of the study were not aware of close textual parallels between one discourse and a recently discovered work of Francis Bacon which argue against this attribution and call attention to deficiencies in the method of proof. Compounding this difficulty, they could not determine the stylistic pattern of Bacon, who is a candidate for authorship of the three discourses. It can be concluded that the authorship of at least one of the discourses is still a mystery, and that while the science of statistical wordprint analysis has advanced significantly over the past thirty years, it still has limitations which must be taken into account in any authorship study.