There are several crucial reasons for the need to reform the world economy. First, the worldwide inflation, a terrible cancerous disease which, if uncontrolled, might destroy the roots of economic development. Second (a direct consequence of inflation), a sudden imbalance in our international monetary system: capital flight in monstrous dimensions, devaluation of important reserve currencies, the United States dollar, the English pound, followed by the Japanese yen and a number of European currencies. Third, growing unemployment all over the world, again as a consequence of inflation and of a worldwide lack of confidence. Finally, but not least, the growing conflict of the developing countries, mainly in the Southern Hemisphere, with the industrialized world mainly in the Northern. This north-south struggle, brewing for long years, has reached the dimensions of what we might call an “economic cold war” on a worldwide level. Thus far, efforts to find new solutions which would be satisfactory to both consumers and producers have failed.

American society over the past dozen years has undergone a general and continuing crisis. Almost everyone agrees on that point, but on the deeper meaning and significance of the crisis, on its origins and precise nature, there is massive disagreement. From all points of the political spectrum flow streams of mutually exclusive analyses and prescriptions.

On June 1, 1958, following a genuine coup-d'état at Algiers led by European colonials and army leaders General de Gaulle returned to power. A new constitution established the Fifth Republic, which, in contrast to the Third Republic (1875–1940) and to the Fourth (1946–1958), provided for a strong and stable executive power. Twenty years later, in the spring of 1978, legislative elections of tremendous importance for France and for the whole West will take place in France. Already all of France is excited about the result of the debate which seems to center on the kind of society France will have: either the continuation of a liberal regime or the coming to power of a Marxist regime with all the incertitudes this prospect implies for the future of freedom.

In his address at the Commencement Exercises of the University, May 22, 1977, President Carter outlined the principles and goals on which the foreign policy of the United States Government understands itself to be based. Given the nature of the topic, the editors of The Review judged that it would be a service to our readers to print it here. The text is complete except for the opening remarks directed to the immediate audience.

The United Kingdom, already beleaguered in the mid-1970's by a number of serious problems—economic, social, political, diplomatic and even climatic—in addition has had to contend with a far-reaching constitutional crisis. Involving the subject of devolution of power (better known as home rule), it has been described as “the most crucial constitutional issue which has confronted the United Kingdom since it came into being.” The controversy over devolution has reached a new level of intensity since November, 1975, when the government, in an effort to resolve the dispute, published a White Paper entitled Our Changing Democracy: Devolution to Scotland and Wales. This article examines the following aspects of the devolution issue: its background, why it has emerged at this time, why the White Paper was issued, reasons for the hostile reaction to the White Paper, the prospects for parliamentary passage of devolution legislation, and the issue's political repercussions and implications, both domestic and international.

In recent years two ideas concerning America's republicanism have gained fairly general currency. First, there is now a growing recognition that a shift in understanding occurred in the decade after the revolution over the nature of republicanism and the political, social, and moral prerequisites necessary for establishing such a government. In particular, the notion of the absolute necessity of “virtue” or “public spiritedness” as the operative principle of republicanism became, for most American political thinkers, not only problematic but nearly indefensible. Second, there is a growing body of literature, journalistic and popular as well as scholarly, calling upon us to reopen the question of civic virtue and to reexamine anew its connection with republican health. After briefly reviewing the theoretical and practical connections made in the revolutionary era between virtue and self-government, this article will attempt to trace the causes for the early declension of the necessity of virtue in America's understanding of the foundations of republicanism. This accomplished, concerned citizens might then be able to evaluate more carefully the contemporary rediscovery of the links between moral character and modern republicanism by contemporary scholars and public men.

No principle commands wider support in political science today than the one which holds that the political scientist's primary task is the construction of theory. Political scientists with little else in common can usually agree on the possibility and desirability of political theory, even though they may disagree vigorously about its nature, source and content. This broad agreement tends to obscure something fundamental, namely, that the very idea of a theory of politics is something peculiar, indeed, something radically problematical. Political life has its own priorities and its own distinctive concerns, and these seem to be at odds with the priorities and concerns of theoretical speculation. The questions that confront the citizen seem to be very different from those that perplex the theorist. A story about the philosopher Anaxagoras serves to illustrate this divergence of the political and theoretical lives as well as the tension between them. It is reported that Anaxagoras took no interest in civic affairs and was blamed for his negligence. When someone asked him whether or not he cared about his country, he replied: “I will have great concern for my country after I have explained the heavens”.

Americans have not always adjusted comfortably to their peculiar heritage as the first revolutionary people of the modern era. Yet the idea of revolution fascinated the founding generation. The reflective, educated leaders based their speculation on the classical conception they inherited from the English Whig or Common-wealth radicals and the venerable ancients. Many went beyond that perspective in the effort to explain the changes produced by the experiences of 1763 to 1789. These thinkers strove to articulate a distinctively American conception of revolution. This article deals with the contribution toward that end of one man, thus making no claim to definitiveness in any broader sense. James Wilson of Scotland and Pennsylvania merits special study as a seminal thinker of considerable significance in American history. For he stands at the beginning of a line of American theorists and activists who not only espoused the idea of revolution but based American constitutionalism on that seemingly contradictory foundation. From reluctant rebel, Wilson emerged as the preeminent spokesman for a new, progressive ideology which fostered one important strand in the variegated fabric of American constitutional thought.

In June, 1974, the two Germanys completed the official “normalization of relations” between them. In the annals of diplomatic history this final act was unique. The two states exchanged, not ambassadors, but “permanent representatives.” Of these, the West German envoy was accredited to East Berlin's foreign ministry as the representative of a foreign country. His East German counterpart, on the other hand, was to deal with the Federal Chancellery in Bonn, in accordance with West Germany's view of the special nature of the East-West German relationship. The West Germans insisted that while there was no longer one German state, there still existed one German nation; this precluded the treatment of the two Germanys as foreign countries. The German Democratic Republic (GDR), however, maintained that not only had the one German state come to an end, but that there existed now, along with the two states, two different nations, one socialist, the other bourgeoiscapitalist. Because of the wholly different systems on which they were based, East and West Germany had nothing in common anymore and constituted two entirely separate, hence foreign, countries. As such, they could establish contact with each other only by means of the customary diplomatic relations. The complex procedure by which relations were in the end established was a compromise between these differing views.

For nearly three centuries, Vico's name remained virtually unknown outside narrow philosophical and literary circles; indications are, however, that he is beginning to emerge from this obscurity.1 His resurgence, it seems to me, is by no means fortuitous or the result of mere antiquarian interests. In a striking manner philosophical developments in our time have revived central themes of the Neapolitan thinker; his preoccupation with practical-historical experience and its exegesis reverberates in many facets of contemporary thought—even bypassing the barrier between Continental and Anglo-Saxon perspectives. On the Continent, Vico's legacy had been preserved to some extent in Dilthey's “life-philosophy”; in a more rigorous fashion, the implications of this legacy were exploredby existential phenomenology and hermeneutics with their focus on the human “life-world” and on the significance of prereflective understanding for cognitive operations. Comparable concerns havesurfaced in analytical philosophy. Abandoning (or at least modifying) the quest for an artificial symbolism capturing the structure of the empirical universe, linguistic analysis during recent decades has shifted attention increasingly to ordinary language as the underlying matrix of practical and theoretical endeavors. In a similar vein, philosophers of science have tended to turn from logical calculation and empirical verification to the concrete “context of discovery”—the paradigmatic frameworks in terms of which investigative procedures are sanctioned and research goals formulated.

John Rawls's book A Theory of Justice1 has been widely looked to not only as a substantive account of the meaning of justice, but also as a model of the procedure by which the requirements of justice may be determined. Rawls terms his mode of approach to justice “moral theory,” and apparently subsumes the traditional discipline of political philosophy under this more inclusive science. At the same time, he claims that his approach is Socratic in nature, and that it “goes back in its essentials to Aristotle's procedure in the Nicomachean Ethics” (pp. 49, 51). “Moral theory,” from this point of view, is simply a new name for the enterprise pursued by the great political philosophers from Socrates onwards. But, surprisingly, despite the number of outstanding thinkers who devoted themselves to this enterprise, little progress was ever made in it, for the theories with which we have been left, according to Rawls, remain “primitive and have grave defects” (p. 52). It is Rawls's claim to have developed a “theory of justice” that is superior to any of those devised by previous philosophers, in that it conforms better to the dictates of men's “sense of justice” (p. 52).

In June, 1945, America's Communists replaced their leader, Earl Browder, who had sought an East-West détente instead of the Cold War. Eight months later they expelled him from the movement altogether, although he had spent twenty-four years in its service. Since 1934, when he had gained undisputed control, he had dominated the Communist party of the United States (CPUSA) “as no one had done before or could do afterward.” Under him it had taken advantage of the Great Depression to achieve a degree of respectability previously unknown. It even enjoyed “a measure of prestige in at least some sections of society.” Probably the best-organized political party to the left of the New Deal, during the thirties it also became the largest Marxian group by outdistancing the socialists. The CPUSA grew in number from 7,000 in 1930 to about 100,000 during the Second World War, with influence ranging far beyond its membership rolls. In contrast to its success under Browder, after his ouster it receded rapidly into political oblivion.

Of all the Fabians Sydney Olivier (1859–1943) was the only one who became interested in the extension of Fabian socialism, in one form or another, to the British colonies. One reason for this perhaps is that he was the only one among the first generation of Fabians who was extremely conscious of his mixed origin. “I have,” he once wrote to his wife in 1884, “a rather fatal facility of seeing several sides to many questions at the same time. That is the result, I expect, of my being such a mixture of French, Irish, and Puritan-Saxon blood. I have two or three brains, and one is always criticizing the other. I shall never be a single-minded bigot.” In an age when European civilization was believed to be “everything” and everything else “nothing” such a temperament was highly conducive to the entertainment of sympathies toward non-European peoples and lands. A biographer of the Webbs came very close to saying this. “Sydney Olivier,” she remarked, “with his rich background of culture, tinged with a streak that can only be called romantic, perhaps derived from his Latin heredity, was … the voice predominantly of the moral sense.” And as is usual in several such controversies concerning the Fabian Society, the word of Bernard Shaw can never be neglected. To Shaw the French ancestry of Olivier enabled the latter to form an objective view of the British Empire and its role in history and it also helped him to get along quite well with non-English Britons.

A signal danger in thinking about politics in terms of some larger philosophical conception—whether of history, anthropology, ontology, and so on—is that one may fail to attain practical concreteness. Marx thought he had overcome this problem when he conceived his own project as a dialectical unity of theory and practice. Yet, as is widely recognized, Marx's own elucidations of his project's core focus, the transition from capitalism to socialism, are difficult to grasp unambiguously as a concrete political program. The twentieth century has borne witness to this both as the collective tragedy of Stalinist totalitarianism and as the inability to theorize a coherent and politically viable Marxist humanism.

The issue of politics and the Catholic Church in Latin America, relegated until recently to nineteenth-century historians, is very much alive today. On the one hand, the church as an institution is enmeshed in public controversy over human rights with repressive regimes from Paraguay to Panama, from Brazil to Chile. When it serves as a shelter for political and social dissent, it is accused by secular authorities of engaging in a “new clericalism.” On the other hand, it has been assailed by critics within for being wed to existing political powers. These radical clergy and lay people believe that the church's social presence is inevitably political, but want to change its alliances to benefit the poor and dispossessed. Furthermore, they believe that the existing order in given situations is aform of “institutionalized violence” against which the Christian response must be “counterviolence.” Such attacks from right and left occur, paradoxically, just at a time when the Latin American church has turned with unprecedented resolve to fundamental pastoral tasks. Politics has thus become a problem just as the hierarchy can claim, with considerable justification, to have eschewedthe practice of partisanship and the pursuit of power.

In the past decade American political science has experienced considerable internal conflict and turmoil. To an extent, these disturbances were unexpected for in the early 1960's the “epitaph” for a “successful” behavioral movement had been written and the “credo” of behavioralism presented. Nevertheless, by the middle of the 1960's a “new revolution in political science” was under way, a revolution “directed against a developing behavioral orthodoxy.” Behavioral political science was challenged on many grounds, but of central importance were these

It is said by some observers of politics and foreign policy that morality has nothing to do with the vital issues of national and international politics. Experienced practitioners note that seldom if ever are moral issues invoked in serious policy discussions; politics and foreign policy are a practical art in which interest and power prevail. Others take issue with this view claiming that from its history America has derived a high responsibility unique among states to stand for certain moral ends and purposes. From its history it has been a nation set apart; its place in the world is dependent on faithfulness to its founding creed embodied in the Declaration of Independence and other statements down to the Atlantic Charter.

Rousseau's Confessions is generally regarded simply as his autobiography or, more precisely, as his apology—his defense of his character and conduct against the attacks of his enemies. Yet he himself claims that the work is philosophically significant; the Confessions is intended to be an account of man as he is according to nature. This essay will attempt to uncover the philosophical import of the Confessions especially as it bears upon the question of the individual and society. The Introduction will establish the philosophical context within which Rousseau places his enterprises and will point to the contemporary political significances of that enterprise. In the second section, Rousseau's understanding of himself as a “natural man” will be examined. The third section will show the radical character of the tension between the individual and society as this tension follows from Rousseau's account of the nature of man. Finally, the root of Rousseau's understanding of the political problem having been exposed, Rousseau's status as the champion of the individual's claims against society will be seen to be highly problematic. That is, Rousseau will show himself to be far more critical of contemporary political- and self-consciousness than is generally thought to be the case.