A great many curious things have befallen Marxism as an intellectual and political tradition, not the least of which was its adoption by the revolutionary forces under the leadership of Mao Tse-tung. Originally, the Marxism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels was a eurocentric doctrine that addressed itself to a postindustrial revolution that would liberate society from the disabilities produced by intensive industrialization. For classical Marxism, industrialization produced not only the “idiocy of overproduction,” the inability to effectively distribute the abundance produced by capitalism, but generated restive populations that were “overwhelmingly proletarian.” Capitalist industrialization produced both the circumstances precipitating, and the historic agents responsible for, vast social, economic and political change.

The study of politics in Africa has undergone significant change in recent years. From an initial fascination with the mechanisms of politics at the state level, emphasis has shifted to an attempt to identify those basic factors underlying patterns of political organization and behavior. More attention is now being given to micropolitical analyses, and an effort is being made to relate political occurrences on the state level to local political culture, development and concerns.

It is by now conventional wisdom among political scientists that political parties are not the noxious weeds they were once thought to be. Undeniably, parties have hastened the development of democracy in the West and continue to serve vital functions in modern states. Most political scientists would agree too that the emergence of regular party competition is only possible among those peoples who have acquired a measure of political sophistication. A country with nourishing parties is a country that has matured to the point of being able to tolerate dissent, and a country with inchoate or languishing parties is a country that must be consigned to the ranks of the “underdeveloped” or the perverse. Party development, then, is often regarded as a measure of political development, and both of these as indexes to modernization or democratization.

Machiavelli, one of the most famous of political writers, wrote a play which many critics regard as one of the best comedies of the Italian Renaissance. The question which inevitably arises is whether there is a connection between the serious and the comic works of Machiavelli, whether the Mandragola stands alone, a tribute pure and simple to the versatility of Machiavelli's mind, or whether the themes of the Mandragola are an extension of the themes found in the bulk of his writings. Is there, in short, a political message, cleverly disguised, in the Mandragola? Some of Machiavelli's commentators think so, but they flatly contradict one another. Alessandro Parronchi regards the Mandragola as an “allegoria del ritorno dei Medici in Firenze,” while Theodore Sumberg interprets the play as a call to overthrow the Medici. Not surprisingly, then, the literary critic is apt to insist that students of politics should mind their own business: literary studies should be left to literary critics, political studies to political critics.

The Review of Politics, which with this issue closes its fortieth year of publication, bears an interesting and faintly exotic relationship to the modern history of Notre Dame and of the Church. At first glance nothing could seem further from what many regarded as the somnolent provincialismof a Midwest Catholic college than the background and career of the founding editor of The Review, Waldemar Gurian. Had Notre Dame been the offspring of a small and youthful religious sect, there could have been no Gurian and no Review. What helped to make both possible was the universal Church, more especially the Church of the Western world. Many observers thought the universal Church itself steeped in somnolent, albeit worldwide provincialism. But the fact is that the Church was, in the 1930's, stirring with change, change which reflected and in turn influenced changes in the intellectual temper of the secular world.

That foreign policy is a social product, that it is in particular the outcome of a political process and an element in the national political system—these are general notions that few scholars would in principle dispute. But in practice foreign policy has been commonly portrayed in exactly the opposite way. It is viewed as some-thing with its own life, essentially cut off from domestic politics, existing primarily in the international sphere. Scholars do of course recognize that domestic factors play a role, but the implied connection is often extremely amorphous and general, with no attempt on the whole made to specify the mode of linkage in a concrete and testable way. Thus America's return to isolation after the First World War is commonly attributed to the unwillingness of her people to bear the burden of world power; British and French foreign policy after 1924 is explained in terms of the deep-seated pacifism of the masses. The actual mechanism of linkage is not spelled out. On those occasions when a specific relation is described the very language used often betrays an unwillingness to see it as a legitimate, integral part of a normal political process. Such things as public opinion and party and interest-group politics are seen basically as exogenous forces, “intruding” or having an “impact” on the policy-making system, not as regular parts of it.

Not all politics is of one kind. To be sure, all politics centers on the state, the most comprehensive order of human existence. Practically as well as theoretically, however, one must distinguish between (1) the politics of justice, and (2) the politics of existence. In some political science departments these two are called “government” and “international relations.” Nor are these the only kinds of politics. One can further distinguish (3) the politics of foundation and (4) the politics of revolution, both of which, however, can be set aside in the present context.

In the 1970's both the theory of development and the thinking on population policy in relationship to development have undergone significant revision. The purpose of this article is to note some of the broad trends in such analysis and to illustrate how Catholic teaching relates to the development-population debate. The relationship is more complex than descriptions often given of it by Catholics and other analysts. This essay seeks to examine the complexity and to propose a way of shaping a position on development and population which can enrich the wider debate and open new avenues of approach for the church.

The need to introduce flexibility and diversity into an increasingly centralized and insensitive system of political and administrative controls is one of the most strongly felt problems in modern democracies. In particular, reforms must be fostered in state governmental and administrative structures to reckon with the evergrowing weight of regional units and metropolitan areas. The debate affects not only the United States but also Western Europe, witness the recent reforms in England, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and Italy. Italy, after delaying by some twenty years the application of the 1948 constitution which called for the establishment of regional governments, has taken steps which should transform the political-administrative base of the country and may serve as guidelines for other societies where regional allegiances remain strong and where metropolitan areas outweigh rural ones in terms of financial needs and commitments. The changes, some twenty years in the works, are worthy of attention as they offer an interesting case of intrastate regionalism coupled with successful elements of micro-regionalization.

The victims of the wars of religion and persecution had their revenge in the growth of a temper indifferent to the claims of particular churches. There were others too who, adopting ancient materialisms, rationalism or the outlook of physical science, rejected theology and abandoned religion altogether. For both, the Enlightenment meant a polemic against the Christian churches, as well as Judaism, and the articulation of new beliefs. Since religions touched in different degrees all spheres of life, the battleground included philosophy, morality and history. Superstition and persecution were the themes of Enlightened church history. God's hand, if there was a God, might direct history in some ultimate way, but not by direct intervention. As there was no “sacred history,” the meaning of history or, at any rate, a way of looking at history, had to be sought anew. After the first quarter of the eighteenth century, this task attracted a remarkable and numerous response, to which the Romantic period added the dense and challenging Idealist philosophies of history. The philosophes, the gurus of Enlightenment, presented history's meaning as not in the past but to come, as salvation from the irrational and the brutal, presented it with a clarity as misleading as it was persuasive.

From the beginning, the Catholic Worker movement, founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin in 1933, has challenged the cherished beliefs of American citizens, many of whom have been more than willing to accommodate religious faith and social concerns to the economic imperatives of American capitalist society. Whether criticizing child labor, the exploitation of blacks, and anti-Semitism during the thirties or protesting the treatment of migrant workers, the Vietnamese War, and the nuclear arms race in the sixties and seventies, the Catholic Worker has consistently adopted controversial positions on contemporary social issues and has challenged Americans to think through the implications ofpublic policy.

At the close of hostilities geography proved decisive in the mis-fortune of Hungary, a country that had been in the inner circle of the German power sphere. From this came the basic problem of Hungarian diplomacy—attempting to preserve Hungarian independence in an almost impossible situation. None of the Axis satellites was in so precarious a position. The peripheral location of Italy, Finland, Rumania and Bulgaria made possible their early surrender, but events in Hungary inevitably turned out differently. Hungary could hardly succeed in changing sides during the war. She did not enjoy the trust of the Germans, her supposed partners. She did not enjoy much sympathy in the West. And she was positively disliked by the Russians. Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden said to President Franklin D. Roosevelt that he “thought Stalin would want to be pretty arbitrary about Hungary.”

The “national interest” has proven to be a highly resilient concept, not only in terms of its malleability in the hands of foreign policymakers and various publics but also in terms of its ability to retain currency among several generations of international relations scholars despite repeated efforts to discredit it. There have been several attempts recently to rehabilitate the concept, including one by the Commission on the Organization of the Government for the Conduct of Foreign Policy which recognized that repudiation of the term by academics did not absolve practitioners from their continuing responsibility to define it. However, the problem with recent attempts on the part of scholars as well as practitioners to reformulate the “national interest” is that they fail to take into account adequately the new realities of world politics which have tended to upset the normal calculus. If the identification of “national interests” has defied precise analysis in the past, it is an even more difficult task today.

Houndsditch, near Bishopsgate, was once the daily scene of traffic and bustle as dealers in second-hand clothing assembled after their daily rounds to pick up what they might sell for a few pence or a shilling. In 1901, Sidney Webb praised Lord Rosebery for his “escape” from Houndsditch—his casting off of his “Gladstonian old clothes” and especially such features of the Liberal program as Irish Home Rule—and provided him with a richly embroidered collectivist cloak to hide his political nakedness. In 1918, partly at Webb's urging, the Labour party adopted a socialist platform. Thereafter, in defining their attitude towards the Empire, a few class warriors within the labor movement advocated an alliance between British workers and the colonial proletariat. The majority, however, returned to Houndsditch: they borrowed their imperial ideas from liberalism, including a variant of the Gladstonian solution for the Irish question.

Vast and rapidly moving social, political and economic changes characterize our times. Almost all current academic political discussion is under the influence of this massive fact. To deal with the rapidity and complexity of these changes new techniques of summarizing, condensing, tabulating, organizing and distributing information have been developed. Corresponding habits of rapid reading and machinelike memorization, reading with a minimum of reflective thought, often seem to be appropriate for imbibing much of this material.

Since 1969 nearly eighteen hundred people have died in the troubles in Northern Ireland. Personal injuries, bombings, rioting and intimidation have also left deep scars on community life. In this context some may argue that there is little point in discussing constitutional proposals, for there can be no settlement until the “politics of the vendetta” and the “policies of the latent atrocity” have worked themselves out. We should, however, not neglect the long-term constitutional possibilities which may minimize the creation of new violence, if not stop the vicious circle of violent reactions to violent provocations. It is the purpose of this paper to examine the arguments for and against some of the proposals which ave recently been put forward. Before these arguments are considered it is necessary to consider briefly the development of the present constitutional situation in Northern Ireland.

Jacques Maritain began his theory of education by supposing that the child is made for freedom, that formal education on all levels, rightly conceived, is essentially aimed at truth and that the achievement of truth in areas such as philosophy, science and art progressively helps to make us free. The child is made to know. This means that he is made for a spiritual conquest of all nature. He is made also to love God and man, and this means that he is made for a conquest of himself. These simple statements were basic.

During the past half-century or so, the world has seen the formation of some one hundred new nation-states, while many of the other fifty-odd political entities have radically altered their previous form of constitution by force, revolution, conquest, election, or change of political philosophy. This has given renewed life to the classical issue about what is the best form of rule under which men ought to live. Political modernization has become a crucial aspect of political science. The external form of almost all these new nation-states, to be sure, even of the most absolute, has almost invariably been some legal variety of “constitutional democracy,” the wording commonly given in modern times to the structure of the best state.

Montesquieu's L' Esprit des lois, first published in 1748, was an innovative and often paradoxical work. Almost as soon as a reader opened it, he was likely to be struck by a singular typology of governments: despotism, monarchy, and republic (subdivided into democracy and aristocracy). This represented a marked departure from the traditional division of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy which Aristotle and Polybius had bequeathed to later students of government. As Robert Shackleton remarks in his definitive biography of Montesquieu, “No major political writer before Montesquieu had founded his work on such an analysis.” Several commentators have remarked on the uniqueness of this typology, and it certainly offers grounds for puzzlement. If Montesquieu had meant to distinguish regimes by the number of those who hold power, then he would have followed tradition by conflating monarchy with despotism while distinguishing aristocracy from democracy more sharply. On the other hand, if he meant to introduce a moral criterion by dividing monarchy from despotism, then he should have continued by differentiating aristocracy from oligarchy and democracy from ochlocracy. The understanding of Montesquieu's typology is made no easier when he assures his readers that the most important political dichotomy is that between despotism and all other regimes. Compared to despotism, both monarchy and republic are good forms of government, and both may be called moderate.