In Democracy's Discontent, Michael Sandel argues for a revival of the republican tradition in order to counteract the pernicious effects of contemporary liberalism. As in his earlier work, Sandel charges that liberals who embrace the ideals of political neutrality and the unencumbered self are engaged in a self–subverting enterprise, for no society that lives by these ideals can sustain itself. Sandel is right to endorse the republican emphasis on forming citizens and cultivating civic virtues. By opposing liberalism as vigorously as he does, however, he engages in a self–subverting enterprise of his own. That is, Sandel is in danger of undercutting his position by threatening the liberal principles upon which he implicitly relies. This danger is greatest when he presses his case against the unencumbered self, when he appeals to the obligations of membership, and when he treats republicanism and liberalism as adversaries rather than allies.

Revolution ushered in the modern world, but modernity has killed it. Scholars who examine the causes or contributing conditions of revolutions focus either on structure, agency, or ideas, yet an analysis of each perspective reveals that the alleged causes or conditions have declined or been eliminated. In spite of capitalism's global crisis in the late 1990s, the spread of liberalism and other factors should make revolutions unlikely to occur.

Racial innocence persists not only in American public life but in its democratic theory as well. An unwillingness to confront the implications of American racial history diminishes theorists' capacity to respond to the exclusion and dehumanization of African Americans in the post-civil rights era. Reading James Baldwin's social critical essays against Michael Walzer's writings on the practice of social criticism, this essay shows how a theorist whose work equips him to grapple with questions of racial injustice nonetheless evades them by constructing three sorts of boundaries: between members and nonmembers, between social critics and certain relations of power, and between the “core” of a people's experience and the brutalities of their history.

This article investigates whether Aristotelian magnanimity is compatible with Christianity. According to Aristotle, this virtue is displayed in claiming and deserving great honors and accompanied by a disdain for others, all of which looks remarkably like the Christian sin of pride. This article argues that in spite of these apparent difficulties Aristotelian magnanimity is compatible with Christian morality, that the deserving Christian may, without prejudice to the virtue of humility, claim great honors, recognize his own superiority, and look down on others. The article concludes with an account of the contemporary political importance of these issues. Responding to scholarship that argues that Christianity's undermining of magnanimity is responsible for modernity's lack of great statesmanship, it is contended on the contrary that in the modern world Christianity alone can make magnanimous statesmanship possible.

I am grateful to Professor Dagger for his insightful critique. He brings out the continuities and differences between Democracy's Discontent and my earlier work with subtlety and care. He writes in defense of liberalism, but not without sympathy for many of the ideals I invoke in the name of republicanism—civic virtue, encumbered selves, obligations of membership, the formative project. In fact, his republican sympathies are so expansive that I found myself unsure at times whether I could identity a fundamental disagreement.

Professor Dagger's basic objection, as I understand it, is this: I overstate the opposition between liberalism and republicanism, between autonomy and civic virtue; in drawing these distinctions too sharply, I fail to acknowledge the elements of liberalism I implicitly affirm. Professor Dagger accepts the importance of civic virtue and the formative project. But he considers it a mistake to oppose liberalism as vigorously as I do, and “particularly wrong to oppose republicanism to liberalism.” Instead, he favors a “hybrid” of liberalism and republicanism that combines autonomy and civic virtue. Any republicanism worth defending must include “a commitment to liberal principles, such as tolerance, fair play, and respect for the rights of others.”

Whether liberalism and republicanism are compatible doctrines depends on how they are conceived. At a certain level of generality, there is no necessary conflict: the liberal tradition stands for toleration and individual rights, while the republican tradition stands for government by the people. Liberal rights support republican self rule by preventing the majority from oppressing the minority, while the republican emphasis on civic virtue restrains individuals from abusing their rights and ignoring the common good.

This article discusses possible interpretations of the concept of national interest, with a view to providing a conception more analytically useful than those that have dominated the literature. It argues against the two most prevalent approaches. The first, most obviously represented by political realism, relies on a single overarching assumption that both encompasses the national interest and provides a standard for assessing how successfully it is pursued. The second, identifies a finite set of national objectives which, by possessing a large measure of the formal attributes by which the national interest is defined, are considered its proper subsets. While both approaches have their virtues, each is flawed as a method for establishing correspondence between policy and interest. The approach proposed here relies on a different principle altogether—the nature of the political procedure via which judgments about the link between foreign policy and national interest are made. The article argues that our ability to judge whether a policy does serve the national interest is intimately connected to how democratic the decision behind the policy is.

Although the influence of Reinhold Niebuhr's thought on political theory has been a profound one, curiously, scholars have quite often misunderstood or misinterpreted his philosophy on issues that are of central importance to his political vision. Specifically, Niebuhr's program for ethical and political action is often described as one of “unrestricted” consequentialism, in which ethical decision making is by necessity reduced to a process where the ends justify the means. Despite the fact that Niebuhr's theory of ethics clearly called for an examination of the likely consequences of one's actions, it should nevertheless not be labeled in this manner.

This article examines the ties between the work of Václav Havel and his dissident mentor Jan Patočka. Havel's political theory consists largely of an evocative, literary reformulation of a number of themes developed by Patočka, the student of Husserl and Heidegger generally recognized as the most significant Czech philosopher of the century. Insofar as Patočka's work continues to be ignored in the West, the intuitively appealing essays of Havel will themselves fail to be fully understood. This study offers an analysis of Havel's debt to Patočka, as well as an explication of the latter's political thought. With Patočka's phenomenological interpretation of ancient and contemporary thought, of Socrates and Heidegger, a bridge is built between the classical and the postmodern that seeks to ground ethics and politics without recourse to the foundationalism of metaphysical accounts of reality.

Michael Sandel's response to my critical essay is thoughtful, generous, and characteristically elegant. I am not the only one, I am sure, who will welcome this clarification of his views. Yet I am inclined to think that what he does not include in his response is as important as what he does.

What Professor Sandel's response does not include is any attempt to sort out, qualify, accept, or reject the criticisms advanced in the “Sandel and the Self” section of my essay. He says in his second sentence that I bring out “the continuities and differences between Democracy's Discontent and my earlier work with subtlety and care,” but he fails to note that most of those continuities concern the unencumbered self he attributes to liberalism. We are left to wonder, then, what he makes of the three charges that I bring against his account of this self: that he mistakes the point of the unencumbered self in Rawlsian liberalism; that he trades on a false dichotomy between the encumbered and the unencumbered self; and that he neglects to notice a distinction, implicit in his as much as in Rawls's thinking, between the self in the abstract, general sense and the self in the concrete, particular sense.

“Conflicting imperatives” lie at the heart of many important social science concepts. This label was introduced by Reinhard Bendix to characterize concepts that entail a dynamic tension among contradictory goals, priorities, or motivations. Notwithstanding the attention scholars give to conflicting imperatives, the importance to social science research of concepts based on conflicting imperatives has not adequately been recognized and the issues of concept formation that arise with these concepts have not been explored. This article seeks to address these shortcomings and to give the consideration of conflicting imperatives a more central place in conceptual and methodological discussions.

This article analyzes John Howard Yoder's vision of the church as a polis which, through its embodiment of particular practices, serves as an analogical anticipation of God's Kingdom, and thereby offers an alternative to utilitarian and agonal understandings of politics. After describing Yoder's ecclesiologically based vision of politics and examining prominent critiques of Yoder's ecclesiology, the theological framework for Yoder's understanding of the state is discussed. Placing the state within the Pauline cosmology of “principalities and powers,” Yoder outlined a Christian relationship to the state marked both by subordination as well as by occasional disobedience, a disobedience which included participation in nonviolent direct action.

Plato's Statesman and Laws are usually linked together as “Plato's later political theory.” Yet these dialogues offer contradictory descriptions of the relation between law and reason and thus between political science and philosophy. In particular, the Eleatic Stranger of the Statesman presents an account of the “second-best” regime that differs from that of the Athenian Stranger in the Laws. The Eleatic Stranger's account of the second-best is wrong; his error follows from his view that politics is insignificant for genuinely human purposes. By comparing human statesmanship to animal herding and explicating its nature through the paradigm of weaving, the Eleatic Stranger contends that the true philosopher is too concerned with individual human natures to care for human collectivities. From his perspective, Socratic or Athenian political philosophy is but sophistry.

In October 1950, John Courtney Murray, S.J., wrote for the use of Msgr. Giovanni Battista Montini of the Vatican Secretariat of State a memorandum: “The crisis in Church-State Relationships in the U.S.A.” An attempt by Murray to encourage a development of Catholic teaching on church and state and religious freedom that would enable American Catholics to give support in principle to the First Amendment of the U.S Constitution, the memorandum was submitted to some American churchmen and to the Vatican's Holy Office. The dossier here published for the first time includes the texts of Murray's memorandum and of responses to it written by Samule Cardinal Stritch and Fr. Francis J. Cornell, C.SS.R. The introduction to these texts sets the memorandum in context and explains the Holy Office's actions against Murray.

This article critically analyzes the work of Will Kymlicka, Charles Taylor, and Michael Walzer, three of the most important contemporary political philosophers writing on issues of multiculturalism. It uses the Rushdie affair, and each theorist's interpretation of it, as the basis for an immanent critique of “multicultural liberalism,” a theory defined by the dual commitment to cultural rights for minority groups and certain core liberal principles, defended in different ways by Kymlicka, Taylor, and Walzer. It is principally concerned with Kymlicka, whose work is one of the most influential attempts to respond to communitarian criticisms that “atomistic” liberalism is inhospitable to community and culture. The article argues that Kymlicka's defense of “multicultural citizenship” is deeply problematic from the perspective of the Rushdie affair. It then considers Taylor and Walzer similarly, as representatives of the communitarian strain of multicultural liberal argument, and likewise finds their positions unconvincing. The article concludes with the suggestion that the Rushdie affair points to a potentially unresolvable tension at the heart of all three attempts to defend multicultural liberalism.

Contemporary critics have treated liberalism as synonymous with individualism. In light of this bias, too little attention has been focused on historical variations within the classical liberal tradition. The “associational” contributions of Burke, Tocqueville and other self-conscious liberals have been neglected largely because they do not conform to common assumptions about the contractarian and individualistic bases of liberal thought. This oversight has obscured perhaps the most distinguishing feature of Edmund Burke's political thought: namely, his attention to that domain known in contemporary terms as “civil society.” In his defense of intermediary institutions Burke demonstrates a prescient understanding of the requirements of modern constitutional arrangements. His thoughts on religious groups, political parties, and other intermediary attachments challenge the anti-associational bias of classical liberals such as Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Madison, and Bolingbroke. Burke's attention to these relationships marks a significant qualification of classical liberalism's early obsession with the perils of pluralism and its dawning sensitivity to the vices of individualism.

Only recently have students of political theory begun to pay attention to Plato's Menexenus, and it deserves this closer study. In this article, it is argued that the dialogue is best read as Plato's at least quasi—serious critique of Pericle' famous Funeral Oration, and that a comparison of these two works leads to a paradoxical discovery. For by presenting Socrates in the Menexenus as a defender of a restrained and traditional politics against the bold imperialism of Pericles, Plato presents a figure who is hard to square with the dialectical critic of the city found in dialogues like the Apology. Whether there is nonetheless some thread tying Socrates' venture at political rhetoric to his signature form of philosophy is the deepest question posed by the Menexenus and one which offers new insight on Plato's complex view of the relation between politics and philosophy.

Eric Voegelin thought his “paradox of consciousness” was “the key to all his other works,” but no one has yet explored it as such a key. “participation” is the central term in Voegelin's philosophy, and the “paradox of consciousness” reveals the paradox of participation: a participant-partner is simultaneously a part and the whole (albeit in a perspective) of a reality of consciousness, like a marriage, a polity, or the cosmos.

For both John Stuart Mill and Wilhelm von Humboldt, self–development is a central value that shapes much of their respective political philosophies. Despite this shared value, however, Mill and Humboldt came to quite different political conclusions. Mill defends an activist state that helps establish the material and institutional prerequisites for self–development, while Humboldt argues for a highly restricted state that provides only security. This divergence is explained by a number of factors: variations in their conceptions of self–development itself; their different views of the empirical prerequisites of self–development; their different views of the state and its relation to society; and their views of the relation between “positive” and “negative” goods.

This article argues that we can best understand the Massachusetts patriot James Otis as a practical political thinker whose writings reacted to changing circumstances and to other writers. He began his career arguing that the British Constitution and natural law both mandated that Parliament not tax unrepresented colonists, but when Blackstone published his opinion that Parliament had a natural and constitutional right to compel the submission of the colonists, Otis became convinced that, however valid his argument had been in theory, it would never convince Parliamentarians. Ultimately he engaged the problem of imperial structure, trying to collapse the political distance between the imperial periphery and the imperial center to overcome the constitutional distance that threatened to separate them for good.

In this memorandum four points will be briefly made.

First, a grave danger confronts the Church in the United States, because the Church is the object of a newly intense fear, distrust, and hostility. At the same time a new apostolic opportunity is being offered to the Church, because the Church is now the object of a new interest, curiosity, and sympathy.

Second, one great obstacle hinders the Church in coping effectively with the danger confronting her. And the same obstacle also blocks her from making full use of the opportunity offered to her. This obstacle consists in the present state of development of the Church's doctrine on Church-State relationships. This doctrine has not yet been vitally adapted to modern political realities and to the legitimate democratic aspirations, especially as they have developed in the United States.