Few philosophers in our tradition have raised structures of speculation more complex than those of Giambattista Vico. Nevertheless, in following the course of his speculation, from the earliest orations through the De Antiquissima Italorum Sapientia, the massive Diritto Universale, and, finally, the successive transformations of the Scienze Nuova, certain definite themes appear which engage his meditation at every stage and impart, as a consequence, unity and coherence, though never simplicity, to the whole. Basic among these is the theme of the civil education of man.

By the spring of 1914 Woodrow Wilson was clearly doing everything in his power to ingratiate the new Democratic Administration with the nation's business groups. He abandoned the Brandeisian spirit of trust-busting as part of his program for corporation control in favor of regulation by commission, a policy more in line with the sentiment among leading businessmen. (Indeed, the Federal Trade Commission established in 1915 soon showed that it would serve as the friend and not the enemy of business.) He directed personal appeals to businessmen both by letter and by informal conversations at the White House, and he made nominations to regulatory agencies like the Federal Trade Commission and Federal Reserve Board that left no doubt as to his sincerity in attracting business support. One of his choices for the Reserve Board, Thomas D. Jones, was at once a personal friend and a former trustee of Princeton University. But Jones was also a well-known member of the “Zinc Trust” and a director of the International Harvester Company then under indictment as a conspiracy in restraint of trade. Wilson campaigned hard for this appointment against strong Senatorial opposition even within his own party. At the same time, he declared publicly: “It would be particularly unfair to the Democratic Party and the Senate itself to regard it as the enemy of business, big or little.” Wilson was outraged when the Senate Banking Committee rejected his friend. “I believe the judgment and desire of the whole country cry out for a new temper in affairs,” he wrote rather despairingly to Jones. “We have breathed already too long the air of suspicion and distrust.”

Looking backward from the early nineteenth century, the Catholic Church in England had disappointingly little scholarly achievement of which to boast since the Reformation. Henry Holden, Charles Butler, John Lingard—all were men to be proud of, but Catholics of such intellectual bent were so few. And understandably so. The penal laws had effectively deprived the recusants of any access to higher education, and would perdure until the latter nineteenth century. Squires whose sons were barred for their faith from most schools and from the two universities had to be content to enroll them quietly at one or another of the exile schools across the channel. The Irish immigrants who later came to fill and overspill the churches in the nineteenth century had even less exposure to—and perhaps appetite for—scholarship. And the clergy who shepherded this extraordinary flock of secluded gentry and boisterous working folk pursued a highly sacramental and understandably unsophisticated pastorate. The Church naturally felt itself somewhat put upon, and fell into rather defensive postures. Scholarship would appear as a luxury at best, and at worst as a weapon that the Establishment seemed always more adept and smooth at handling.

John Dewey was both a devoted student of politics and an eminent philosopher. He constructed his theory of political democracy according to his own philosophical orientation. At the same time, he believed that political science should be pursued independently of political philosophy on the assumption that the “scientific method” alone is meaningful in resolving political questions. It is through his philosophy of “experience,” instrumentalism, that Dewey resolved the potential antithesis between philosophy and experimental science as he understood it. It is the scientific method alone, Dewey insists, that can do justice to the integrity of “experience.” Moreover, through its application to political democracy, the scientific method is the link connecting philosophical instrumentalism and democracy. Accordingly, this essay will attempt to show: 1) the threefold relationship among philosophy, science, and democracy provides the key to an understanding of Dewey's political thought; 2) the philosophical antecedents of instrumentalism, being inseparable from Dewey's “scientific method,” provide normative content for his democratic theory; and 3) the purpose of Dewey's application of the scientific method to political democracy is to reshape traditional values in accordance with the philosophical — and not necessarily scientific — antecedents of instrumentalism.

The philosophical framework for Lord Acton's theory of nationality, or to be more accurate his theory of multinationality, derives both from Aristotle and from Christian thinkers of the Middle Ages and the early modern period. In Aristotle he found the view that the nature of the state is to be a plurality. Aquinas gave him “a very large element of political liberalism,” while Leibnitz contributed the idea of development, particularly the notion that development involves continuity and progress. Combining these points of view, Acton embraced a patently individualistic position, believing firmly that only the individual man possesses moral and political rights. Classes, races and states are at best chance groupings, at worst tortuous human inventions, and consequently have no inherent rights. It is “easier to find people fit to govern themselves,” according to Acton, “than people fit to govern others.”

The historian initially marks off his subject matter from the past's welter or continuum by emphasizing the unique color and tone of the events he has selected. He, therefore, appears to be preoccupied with the transient and, as we may say, in self-preoccupation, with mortality. But the point about our mortality is that, as we have so far had successors, our transiency is within a cycle of death and birth. From this cycle some of our works escape, perhaps to join a larger cycle. Flux has, then, no unlimited dominion. If we cannot step twice into quite the same river, our words win a metaphysical triumph for constancy when we define river as embanked watery flux. Still more happily, at any rate so far as the present occasion is concerned, some of our institutions endure. This endurance of St. Mary's and its promise for the future are what we celebrate.