Twentieth-century feminist scholarship has largely ignored the foundational role of theology in Wollstonecraft's moral and political philosophy, and its role in shaping the development of her philosophy of the family through three distinct stages. Wollstonecraft was a traditional trinitarian Anglican in her early writings, a rationalistic unitarian Christian Dissenter in her middle writings, and a Romantic deist, skeptic and possible atheist in her late writings. The early Wollstonecraft views the traditional family as a cave that traps humanity in a morass of corruption with no hope of escape except in the next life; the middle Wollstonecraft believes that once the family takes a new, egalitarian form, it can serve as a “little platoon” (to use Burke's phrase) that instills the moral, social and political virtues in each generation of citizens; while the late Wollstonecraft fears that the traditional family is a prison from which women have little hope of escape, either in this world or through passage to the next.

This essay critically explores the efforts of John Stuart Mill and contemporary Millian scholarship to provide a utilitarian justification for a categorical principle of personal liberty. What is distinctive about Mill's argument is its pronounced emphasis upon character development as an essential constituent of happiness; the heart of the argument is that freedom of choice promotes a kind of elevated or worthy human character upon which happiness ultimately depends. Hence, society must be prevented from imposing any conventional or customary morality which would restrict individual autonomy. This case for the sovereignty of personal autonomy is infected with a number of difficulties and ambiguities. Central among these are weighty problems associated with Mill's crucial concept of individuality and its relation to human excellence or nobility of character. The refinements upon Millian doctrine introduced by his current supporters do not, and cannot, resolve its inherent ambiguities.

Between 1940 and 1946, carastrophe befell France and the French Empire. In Europe, France collapsed before the German war machine and submitted to a humiliating treaty and to military occupation. Nor did Liberation and the triumph of de Gaulle's Free French Movement fully revive France's spirit. She had played a relatively small part in the Allied victory and in the conferences of the Powers that sought to restore the peace. The grandeur of France's past, her military tradition, and her civilization meant little in the world of 1946.

This paper analyzes Aristotle's discussion of courage, the first and paradigmatic virtue in his account of moral virtue, as the perfection of human beings’ natures as both political and rational. It identifies unrecognized complexities in his definition of courage as “a mean with respect to fear and confidence,” in his subtle analysis of political courage, and especially in what he reveals to be the conflict-riddled reasons people find courage noble and good. While working to moderate the excessive fieriness of traditional heroism and to render citizens’ courage more sober and moderate, Aristotle shows why political courage can in fact never be made perfectly rational, pointing to a key limit to human rationality altogether.

The relationship between pluralism and liberalism has been at the center of recent considerations of Isaiah Berlin's thought. In particular, liberal theorists have asked whether the value pluralism Berlin endorses actually undermines his liberalism. A common interpretive approach resolves this problem by presenting Berlin's pluralism as “limited” rather than “radical,” and therefore capable of serving as a moral foundation authorizing liberalism. I challenge this re-construction of Berlin's work, arguing that such readings are premised on a conception of judgment Berlin does not share. While many of his readers believe that a judgment on behalf of liberalism requires the identification of a transcontextual ground, Berlin invites us to see human judgment as a meaningful practice that occurs in the absence of absolutes yet does not simply mirror local norms. Berlin's defense of liberalism models this kind of judgment—a judgment that is neither mandated, nor ruled out, by pluralism.

So much has been written in the past few decades about the United States involvement in the Korean and Vietnamese wars that it is difficult to move beyond the usual arguments and the rather skewed assumptions on which they rest. However, the need for fresh and serious review of these matters is essential to understand the new era of multipolar politics now dawning. The purpose of this article is twofold: first, to ascertain persistent patterns of the underlying rationale of the politics of American involvement in Asia; second, to critically analyze United States foreign policy in Korea and Vietnam during the war periods of 1950–53 and 1961–73.

Recurring and fundamental questions about policy-making in the United States focus on Congress' ability to initiate legislation. Does Congress lead? How and when? Are conditions changing to enhance or inhibit congressional initiative?

Nearly all commentators on the legislative process see the president's leadership as natural. But many have argued that he has become the dominant or even exclusive initiator of major legislation. House Republican Leader John Rhodes recently wrote that “Congress has served as little more than a glorified echo chamber for the Executive Branch of government—usually content to approve or disaprove [sic], rarely willing to initiate.” Former Senator Mike Monroney asked, “Is Congress still capable of initiating and enacting its own legislative program?”

Most of the historical analysis of the American fight for a League of Nations in 1919–1920 centers strictly on the struggle between Wilson and Lodge. In such a narrow approach, certain vital forces at work during this epic struggle have been overlooked or largely ignored. One such case is the story of the Anglo-French attempt to help the American nation out of the partisan deadlock that developed around the League issue. This episode takes on added dimensions as an Allied intervention in the internal affairs of the United States that in the end had a dynamic effect. Additionally, the effort came very close to providing the means for compromise. The story properly began with the signing of the German Treaty in Paris and the departure of most of the American delegation.

This article looks at Kant's attitude to political change by examining closely the contrast he draws between palingenesis and metamorphosis in his doctrine of right (1797). The article attempts to explain why Kant prefers the use of metamorphosis as an analogy and looks closely at his objections to the use of palingenesis. Here Kant's treatment of palingenesis is compared with the use of the term made by the eighteenth-century Genevan biologist Charles Bonnet. It is suggested that Kant's rejection of rebellion and revolution is connected to his advocacy of gradual, organic change as conveyed in the notion of metamorphosis. This notion is explored according to eighteenth-century and present scientific understandings of the term. The conclusion stresses the merits of Kant's approach to political change, and indicates why it might be superior to the conservative and revolutionary alternatives.

The tide of events is increasingly pushing away those stereotypes which depict Africa as a continent of passive, ignorant men and of primitive socio-political organization. “Host to a variety of social, economic, and intellectual stimuli, Africa finds its destiny directed into new and uneasy patterns,” one student has observed. “Such a process is a challenge to Western political practice and belief. Can the content and structures of democratic popular government serve as a medium of reintegration for the many peoples of Africa as they seek to modify their activities and their aspirations in the light of modern practice?”

Strauss devoted his life to the recovery of classical political philosophy. The incentive for this enterprise was what Strauss called “the crisis of the West.” That crisis “consists in the West's having become uncertain of its purpose,” which was to establish the good society on the basis of reason and science. Twentith-century history revealed that the progressive spread of democracy throughout the world was hardly assured. Moreover, the “good society” of Western liberalism no longer looked unquestionably good. Modern philosophy eventually concluded that reason itself was to blame: not only could reason not establish the good society; it could not even say what the good society is.

In the 1960s, the New Left sought to transform American society by mobilizing the most oppressed and excluded groups—blacks, the poor, unemployed youths. This article explores both the causes and consequences of the powerful attraction that the American New Left felt for the oppressed and downtrodden. The political thought and actions of the New Left cannot be reduced to psychological motives but must instead be rooted in the New Left's commitment to radical egalitarian social relations and values. While there is much that can be admired in the New Left's deep and sincere concern for the disadvantaged, the New Left's romance with the oppressed also had darker, illiberal consequences that led many in the New Left to excuse and justify the very sort of oppression they had originally sought to oppose.

Social or political proposals of the “ideal polity,” some of which amounted to outright Utopias, came to be fairly common during the fourth and third centuries B.C. In addition to Plato's famed Republic (which is said to have been influenced in part by Hippodamus as well as by certain Pythagorean ideas) and Antisthenes' somewhat “unorthodox” social views, Diogenes of Sinope, Iambulus and Zeno the Stoic, for instance, wrote on the “ideal city.” Also, a great many treatises On Kingship, which frequently were nothing more than part of that “mirror of princes literature” which can be traced back at least to Antisthenes, were authored during the same period. But it will be noticed that these relatively early Polities, including that of Zeno, uniformly advocated a small and highly articulated city-state with extremely narrow limits and relatively limited objectives rather than a pan-humanitarian or cosmopolitan ideal. The well-known Stoic cosmopolitanism, which some scholars have called the philosophic corollary of Alexander's conquest, is definitely of later date, later even than Zeno's widely known Republic, which still adheres to the confining notions of the traditional (and fateful) Greek particularism. This, in turn, compels us to distinguish between the early Zeno who in his original dependence on early Cynic teachings apparently shared in this limited outlook, and the late Zeno, who was able to conceive the whole universe as one single great city of gods and men without distinction of race or nationality. It is safe to assume, therefore, that Zeno's Republic is one of his earliest works and perhaps his earliest.

The war which Great Britain entered in 1939 has now been won by the United Nations. But for the first of the great partners of the Alliance the costs have been tremendous. Of the £4 billions in overseas investments which Britain possessed before the war, only about £2 billions remain—most of the rest were spent in meeting charges of war goods which had to be purchased during the period of Cash and Carry. Not only has this important source of British income been lost but during the same period Britain built up an external debt of £3½ billions. Britain's great merchant fleet, which lost about 11 million tons by enemy action during the war, has by a prodigious effort recovered 2/3 of its 1937 level of 17½ million gross tons. But the quality of many of the ships is unsatisfactory and at the same time the United States has developed a merchant fleet several times larger than Britain's. In the competition to carry the world's shrunken international trade, Britain will be at a greater disadvantage than it has ever been during the present century. In other invisible exports also she faces serious difficulties; for example, the overseas business of British insurance companies which contributed £12 to £15 million annually to the balance of trade is threatened with restrictions in capitalistic countries and extermination in collectivistic ones. The British export trade which in 1938 contributed about £450 million to the national income and on which Britain depends to a greater extent than any other great country for the maintenance of its standard of living (the fourth highest in the world,) has shrunk by 1944 to 55% in value and 31% in volume of the 1938 level.

Peace in the Near East is essential to the State of Israel, to the Arab people and to the Western world. Peace, as distinguished from an armistice, cannot be imposed from the outside, it can only be the result of negotiations, of mutual compromise and eventual agreement between Jews and Arabs.

The Jewish settlement in Palestine may become a very important factor in the development of the Near East, but it will always remain a comparatively small island in an Arab sea. Even in the event of maximum immigration over a long period of years the reservoir of prospective citizens of Israel is limited to roughly two million, a figure that could be substantially increased only by catastrophic events in the United States or the Soviet Union. Since, however, (apart from the improbability of such a turn of events) the State of Israel owes its very existence to these two world powers, and since failure to achieve a genuine Jewish-Arab understanding will necessarily make its survival even more dependent upon continued sympathy and support of one or the other, a Jewish catastrophe in the two great surviving centers of world Jewry would lead almost immediately to a catastrophe in Israel.

ItIs customary to describe the development of political science since the Second World War as a step toward the creation of an empirical science of politics. Not its empiricism, however, but rather its concern for theory is understood to be the defining characteristic of the new way. The prescientific period was also empirically oriented, but it was naive, unthinking empiricism which treated the acquisition of political knowledge as a matter of collecting political facts as one might collect butterflies. Empiricism became scientific, it is said, only when it became theoretical, when its practitioners realized that before they could collect butterflies they had first to fashion a proper net and devise a scheme for ordering the specimens to be caught. At the heart, then, of what we mean today by the science of politics stands political theory, understood as the self-conscious construction of conceptual systems for ordering reality and of hypotheses to explain the interconnections of the parts of these systems. Beside the scientist as survey researcher and statistician stands the scientist as theorist, as author of approaches, frameworks, and models.

John Hilton, Noel Reynolds, and Arlene Saxonhouse have employed statistical authorship analysis to claim that Hobbes authored three anonymously published works. But the authors of the study were not aware of close textual parallels between one discourse and a recently discovered work of Francis Bacon which argue against this attribution and call attention to deficiencies in the method of proof. Compounding this difficulty, they could not determine the stylistic pattern of Bacon, who is a candidate for authorship of the three discourses. It can be concluded that the authorship of at least one of the discourses is still a mystery, and that while the science of statistical wordprint analysis has advanced significantly over the past thirty years, it still has limitations which must be taken into account in any authorship study.

In Egypt, as in most developing countries, universities form part of the state system. The university is regarded as a government department. The Egyptian government not only appropriates money for higher education, but also controls the administrative structure of the universities and the higher institutes. Academic appointments as well as promotions and dismissals are in the hands of state officials. This kind of relationship dates back to 1925, when the Egyptian government “nationalized” and created what is now the University of Cairo. This development is closely related to the rise of Egyptian nationalism and the efforts of Egyptian leaders to achieve independence from British rule. Right from the beginning, the university was therefore conceived as an important instrument for the realization of national (political) goals.

Robert Caro's biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson prove fruitful for political theory, particularly when approached in tandem, along the lines of Plutarch's comparative profiles. Building on the supposition that general insights into political power and its ethics lie in biographical particulars, Caro demonstrates that the most exhaustively detailed research of the most extreme subjects can yield otherwise inaccessible findings. Similarities between Moses and Johnson expose common mechanics of accumulating power, converting personal relationships into institutional authority, and show that norms are given effect as tools used by politicians. Contrasts offer the career as a unit of moral evaluation and suggest that although power may corrupt, it also “reveals.” A praiseworthy career should aim at ends distinct from both ideals and means. Assessment depends not only on intents or accomplishments, but on means, weighing their morality against their necessity.

When Crane Brinton published his Anatomy of Revolution in 1938, he noted in his bibliography fewer than thirty titles in English that dealt in general terms with revolution. Today a comprehensive listing would include some ten times that number of articles and books, and such proliferation seems likely to continue as scholars go on with their examination of revolution as a theoretical problem and in a number of theoretical and historical contexts. Like Brinton, most have taken a comparative approach, attempting to develop a conceptual framework capable of explaining the nature and the occurrence of all revolutionary movements. More recent studies, however, have moved in the direction of placing revolution in broader contexts.