As equality has come to dominate the postliberal era, so virtue was earlier supplanted by liberty. However tentatively, events in many countries suggest a serious erosion in the consensus for equality. Critics of the egalitarian mind-set are achieving a new respectability. Conservative recommendations are hardly uniformly accepted, but they are now heard and, increasingly, countered on practical rather than theoretical grounds. Whether this marks a real revolution, it is at least temporarily popular to question equality in public.

IN A FAMOUS dialogue between the Athenian ambassadors and the Council of the small island of Melos, Thucydides has given the classical statement of the “right” of the stronger. “The brave Milesians soon see that they cannot appeal to the Athenians' sense of justice, because the Athenians recognize no standard but their own political advantage…By making the Athenians justify the right of the stronger through the law of nature, and transform God from the guardian of justice into the pattern of all earthly authority and force, Thucydides gives the realistic policy of Athens the depth and validity of a philosophical doctrine.” The Dutch, in the days of Peter Breughel, used to say: “the big fish devour the little fish” to which Spinoza added “by natural right.” That is the doctrine of the “state,”as inherited from the Greeks. Similar situations still haunt us. Did the Russians by natural right seek to destroy Finnish independence?

The attack on natural right in the name of history takes in most cases the following form: natural right claims to be a right that is discernible by human reason and is universally acknowledged; but history (including anthropology) teaches us that no such right exists; instead of the supposed uniformity we find an indefinite variety of notions of right or justice. Or, in other words, there cannot be natural right if there are no immutable principles of justice, but history shows us that all principles of justice are mutable. One cannot understand the meaning of the attack on natural right in the name of history, before one has realized the utter irrelevance of this argument. In the first place, “consent of all mankind” is by no means a necessary condition of the existence of natural right. Some of the greatest natural right teachers have argued that, precisely if natural right is rational, its discovery presupposes the cultivation of reason, and therefore natural right will not be known universally: one ought not even to expect any real knowledge of natural right among savages. In other words by proving diat there is no principle of justice diat has not been denied somewhere or at some time, one has not yet proven that any given denial was justified or reasonable. Furthermore, it has always been known that different notions of justice obtain at different times and in different nations. It is absurd to claim diat the discovery of a still greater number of such notions by modern students has in any way affected the fundamental issue.

This essay questions whether it is as appropriate as it is common to speak of the federal judiciary as legitimately engaged in “statesmanship”— however that rather slippery concept may be denned or elucidated. Scholars of both the “interpretivist” and “noninterpretivist” schools in constitutional law appear to subscribe to the expectation that judges should be statesmen. Some point to Tocqueville for support of this notion. The argument here is that Tbcqueville is unreliable on this point, for he parts company not only with his contemporary, Joseph Story, but with the framers of the Constitution. The Federalist is examined for its thoughts on the meaning and location of statesmanship in the constitutional order, and it is argued that the essays on the judiciary reveal a conspicuous absence of any expectation that that branch should contain statesmen. Indeed, Publius advances an argument that Congress should act to restrain (through the threat of impeachment) judicial temptations to engage in any adventures that can be called statesmanship.

It is no easy matter to do justice to Locke or any other capable seventeenth century thinker: to judge them in terms which are wholly appropriate to them, but which also give due weight to our own necessarily very different needs and preoccupations. Yet if equality is a normative relation which holds in time as well as space (and not a purely pragmatic relation which characteristically fails to hold anywhere at all), there must be a justice which sets a limit to the permissible inroads of all subsequent concerns on the part of other human beings: a personal entitlement to consideration in their own terms and on their own terms before we decide how far to set those terms aside to implement our own purposes in ways which may put their reflections to uses in which they could have held no conceivable stake. So seen the duty is a side constraint on interpretive licence, not an arbitrary restriction of subject matter, or a taboo on cognitive interest. It is fully discharged once we have done our best to grasp what it is they were talking about, and what led them to affirm and deny what they did. After that point, it holds no guarantee whatever (though it may, of course, hold some potential) of contributing further, even heuristically, to our capacity to judge what to make for ourselves of what they affirmed or denied.

Martin Heidegger's rectorate (1933–1934) was characterized by an incontestable involvement with Nazism. However, neither the rectorate, nor Heidegger's ambitious project for the transformation of the university within which it was embedded, was reducible to Nazism. Indeed, Heidegger's project to transform the university dates from his earliest lecture courses at Freiburg University in 1919 and was a hallmark of his thinking long before the rise of Nazism. That project was itself linked to the long-standing dispute in German academia over the role of the university in the modern world, which involved such thinkers as Kant, Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. Despite the entanglement with Nazism, which stamped his rectorate, Heidegger's thinking about the university as a site for the transformation of human existence is especially pertinent today.

This study suggested itself to the author when he noticed that such work as had been done on British attitudes to America fell into two main divisions: (a) studies, usually of American origin, of movements in the mass of British opinion; (b) studies of the radical and politically “nonconformist” elements in British political society. Both of these seemed to the author to be vitiated as contributions to the understanding of the various developments of Anglo-American relations, the former because the social structure of British political power does not weigh mass movements of opinion very highly, the latter because in the 61 years from 1895–1956, radical elements have controlled British foreign policy for a mere eight years and disputed control only for a further six.

When Alexis de Tocqueville, a perceptive young French aristocrat, was thrown against the turmoil of the nineteenth century, he became a student of social structure and a political philosopher. By background he was Catholic in faith and of the nobility in outlook. But he faced revolution in France and everspreading social change in European society. An unwilling child of the French Revolution, he was led to see broad meaning behind the passing events of the political hour. This ability to extrapolate into the future the present incident permitted him to see many of the social trends which have come to tragic cacophony in the wars of the twentieth century. No one today is ashamed to read the provocative pages Tocqueville wrote, and all who read him find relevance to the present world.

This article challenges the received view that Woodrow Wilson provided the intellectual foundation for the subsequent expansion of the executive power of the presidency, by examining how Wilson arrived at his later presidentially centered account of American politics in Constitutional Government. Its focus is a memo that Wilson wrote in December 1885 while preparing an essay on “The Modern Democratic State.” Wilson's objectives in using the executive were determined in large measure by a conception of modern democratic opinion leadership that he had worked out before he entered public life. He correctly sensed that executive power, with its decisionistic bias, posed a serious problem for constitutional self-government. By making it subserve opinion leadership, Wilson meant to remove executive action from the apex of modern constitutional government and thus subordinate executive power to deliberative politics.

Wallace K. Ferguson, the noted Renaissance scholar, once wrote that history must be seen through the eyes of the one writing it. He went on to say that, “since history is in this sense created by the historian, and he, in turn, is the product of his age and environment, history varies from generation to generation and must be constantly reinterpreted.” It is with this thought in mind that we will undertake a reexamination of the role of the Arctic in Canadian-American relations.

In recent years the Arctic has become a region of growing significance for both the United States and Canada after decades of marginal interest bordering on neglect. It is this article's position that Canadian foreign policy, concerning the Arctic regions to the north of her mainland, has consistently from 1880 to 1970 been based upon a perception of potential threats, which in fact never existed. Furthermore, such a perception has been based in part upon the unsettled nature of international law in the Arctic and the effect of certain environmental factors, labeled as domestic sources of foreign policy in Dale Thomson and Roger Swanson's Canadian Foreign Policy: Options and Perspectives. The article, then, shows how Canadian foreign policy in this issue-area illustrates the Sprout's paradigm of perception in decision-making. According to this paradigm, “what matters in policymaking (and, of course, in analysis thereof) is how the human policymaker (or group) perceives, interprets and responds to the environing conditions and events.”

In recent years, several writers using the new political economy or public choice approach to political analysis have sought to improve our understanding of bureaus, bureaucrats and governments and, in some cases, to suggest ways in which their behavior might be “improved” in the public interest. The public choice approach to public administration rejects the so-called sociological or traditional political science approaches with their alleged Parsonian, Weberian, Marxist, historical, institutional or organic biases and limitations in favor of an individualistic, deductive, noninstitutional analysis, which is thought to be more cogent, more fertile in testable hypotheses, more genuinely theoretical and more relevant in terms of reform. Here the view is taken that the pathos of the public choice approach to public administration consists in this: that public choice advocates by virtue of their methodology are fated to “lose” consistently on questions of administrative reform and prescriptive efficacy, even while contributing, potentially importantly, to the scientific understanding of nonmarket, usually public, organizations or “bureaus.”

Jeremy Waldron's much noted book, God, Locke, and Equality, has put the topic of “God and Equality in Locke” at the center of many perhaps most, discussions of Locke these days. I am going to raise some critical objections to Waldron's interpretations, but all the more reason to begin by noting the very many things about this book that I admire.

First, he rejects the insistence by many of the most outspoken Locke scholars that a proper understanding of Locke—or any philosopher of the past—must be purely historical—that it must have nothing to do with us or our concerns, questions, or problems. Professor Waldron cuts through this claim as mere arbitrary assertion.

Second, many Locke scholars, often some of the same ones, insist that Locke's political writings must be understood in isolation from his philosophic writings, especially from his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Locke's editor, Peter Laslett, set the tone long ago when he pronounced judgment: “Locke did not write as a philosopher, applying to politics the implications of his views of reality as a whole.” Rather, according to Laslett, Locke appealed to or drew off of preexisting “modes of discourse.” This approach makes it very difficult to understand Locke as an integral personality, much less as a coherent author or as a thinker to be taken seriously. Waldron thus reopens the lines of communication between Locke's political and his philosophical writings and makes Locke a significant thinker, not just a corpse for the historians.

During the first years of the American federal republic, Europe was being overrun by French revolutionary forces and ideas. Nation after nation had fallen to the revolutionaries–first weakened by propaganda and subversive organizations, then subdued by soldiery, finally converted into subordinate allies. Watching these successes, some Americans feared that the Atlantic was too narrow to keep revolutionary arms and ideology away. Indeed, the ideology seemed already to permeate the country.

American relations with the successful French nation had become tense and strained shortly after France and Britain went to war in 1793. Many people thought the country had been needlessly endangered by mismanagement of our foreign relations in such a way as to antagonize an otherwise friendly French government. Others thought the United States had been imperilled by too great a toleration of pro-French and revolutionary elements among us, who concealed diabolical designs against American security underneath their very vocal admiration for liberty, equality, and fraternity.

At the turn of the century, American higher educational institutions were rapidly divesting themselves of their religious content and functions. The conscious attempt of the University of Illinois to separate itself from its fifty years of vaguely Protestant Christianity was representative of this process, which was, in fact, the final chapter in the gradual secularization of the higher learning that had prevailed in the Western European tradition for some eight hundred years. Fully to understand these developments entails a historical analysis of the complex and dialectical cultural and political changes that brought them about, including a critical definition of secularization as a way of thinking and as a social-political program. The practical problem, it is argued, is located in the post-Reformation tendency to confuse an institution of higher learning with a local church, the Yale experience furnishing an instructive example of this confusion. The result was a religious demand the university could not meet and a corresponding withdrawal of religion to a merely pastoral and psychological strategy in place of its former substantive intellectual role. Thanks to the “Kantian defense,” neither orthodoxy nor the new liberal Christianity (which might have been seen as a candidate to replace it in academe) any longer needed the university, both having retired to a safer autonomy. The resulting dilemma, that to be religious hampers learning, and that to be learned entails at least religious neutrality if not its complete abandonment, persists in present day conflicts over the role of religion in our educational institutions at all levels.

The involvement of peasants in the rebellions and revolutions of the distant past has been impressive in certain respects, but never acquired quite the importance attributed to it in our own time. In terms of the sheer weight of their numbers, the vastness of the peasants involvement in some internal wars of the past may perhaps never be duplicated. Over twenty million Chinese peasants' were killed in the terrible T'ai-p'ing (1850–1864). Nor was the significance of these colossal figures limited to sheer mass, as the Mexican Revolution illustrates. But never before has so much reliance been put on the peasants for so ambitiously revolutionary plans as in our time. Particularly since the Chinese Communist Revolution, the peasantry has displaced the industrial proletariat as the crucial revolutionary class in the dogma of the most militant Marxists. We have been told repeatedly that Mao, Guevara, Giap, and their disciples have put their hopes in the peasantry and the countryside not merely for radical upheavals through revolutionary wars in underdeveloped countries, but also for global revolution. The role the peasants actually play in such revolutionary wars is among the crucial problems of our time.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China remains the world's only major communist society. Will China's regime go the way of its Soviet counterpart, or might it survive well into the next century and beyond? I do not undertake to answer this question directly. But my analysis of one sector of contemporary Chinese society—the legal system—suggests that the Communist party is losing its tight control over several major areas of Chinese society. In the long-run the party will be progressively weakened by current trends toward legal modernization. These trends encourage more liberal (because noninstrumentalized) forms of political, and not only legal, organization.

Politicians and scholars alike have blamed postmodernism—and the identity politics that have emerged in its wake—for the pathologies of the early twenty-first century. Despite his limited defense of the Enlightenment and his disputes with his French contemporaries, I argue that Habermas's philosophy displays many postmodern characteristics that are often overlooked. These include its decentering of the autonomous subject, its skepticism towards metaphysics, and its rejection of stadial philosophies of history. In light of the fact that Habermas adopts weaker versions of many postmodern commitments, I reconsider his disputes with Foucault and Derrida regarding the legacy of the Enlightenment. I conclude that rather than interpreting Habermas as a conservative critic of his more radical counterparts in France, we should instead see these three thinkers as part of a shared attempt to come to terms with the problems of postwar Europe in a public, discursive manner.

A growing number of political activists and scholars defend the idea of state-based or political-institutional civil disobedience: they locate civil disobedience's agency in state rather than civil society–based actors. Diverging from older ideas of civil disobedience as directed against government, the concept of institutional disobedience raises tough questions its exponents have not yet fully answered. Civil disobedience has usually referred to politically motivated lawbreaking that is morally conscientious, nonviolent, and demonstrates basic respect for law. Because of the modern state's normatively ambivalent traits (e.g., its monopoly on legitimate coercion), political-institutional disobedience is incompatible with minimally acceptable interpretations of civil disobedience's core components. Political-institutional civil disobedience's advocates mischaracterize what they in fact are proposing, namely, disobedience to the law by individual state officials. Such offiical disobedience poses challenges distinct from and probably greater than civil society–based disobedience.

This article asks why new protest movements have recently emerged in Western Europe by focusing on the British postwar race and anti-nuclear movements. Contrary to “subjective” propositions which have attributed their emergence to inter-generational value change, this article instead proposes a “structural” explanation. It is argued that the failure of the major British political parties to articulate citizen concerns on a number of salient issues has generated extra-party initiatives whose willingness to “voice” citizen anxieties primarily explains their popular support. Once in existence, these groups further politicize the conflict over public policy through various unconventional activities.

There are seventy states in the world that are not formally aligned with either of the great power alliance systems, Western or Soviet. With varying degrees of precision, each state defines its foreign policy in terms of its nonalignment. Some of these states additionally refer to their foreign policy in terms of neutralism, which they may often qualify in terms of such adjectives as “positive” or “dynamic” to indicate that they are not passive role players in world politics. Some ventures of neutralists into self-definition have resulted in considerable confusion. As an example may be cited V. K. Krishna Menon's description of India＇s policy: