This article seeks to refute the prevailing scholarly view that Hamilton, like the Founders generally, lacked a deep concern about slavery. The first part examines Hamilton's political principles and shows that they were not Hobbesian but consistent with the views of more traditional natural law theorists. Accordingly, Hamilton understood that the natural rights of man imposed a corresponding duty to end slavery. The second part examines Hamilton's endorsement of a compensated emancipation, his opinions of the Constitution, his conduct of American foreign policy, his involvement in the state abolition societies, and his economic policies to demonstrate that ending slavery was in fact one of his abiding concerns.

The world is entering yet another age of economics. Virtually all the major problems which preoccupy governments are economic problems — problems of growth and limits, food and fuel, employment and inflation, productivity and expanding populations, development and justice. The official documents of the churches since Rerum Novarum (1891) seem more and more preoccupied with economics. Yet there is hardly a less developed area in the tradition of Christian thought, whether in philosophy or in theology, than the relation of Christianity to economics.

Following World War II, survey researchers taught a generation of Americans that ordinary people were not to be trusted on fundamental rights because their attitudes were reactionary, intolerant, and generally bad. The article examines this research and its influence on constitutional politics. It proposes that this attitude perspective fostered elite domination in matters of fundamental right and an orientation away from economic rights. The article also suggests that by turning from public opinion to public knowledge we may reclaim a democratic constitutional practice.

TheProblem of the origins and development of the office of Reich President in the Weimar Republic is of interest for several reasons, possibly the principal one being its relation to the general problem of Hitler's accession to power. It will be recalledthat Hitler came to power initially as Chancellor in a “Presidial” cabinet, that is, one responsible to the President rather than to the Reichstag and governing bythe use of the President's emergency powers. I propose to discuss here the role of the President of the Reich, as conceived of by the constitutional framers, in the light of the emergence of the Presidial cabinet.

Theoreticians have always stood in the vanguard of revolutions with programs which were designed to chart the course for nascent political régimes. When the Third Reich was officially ushered in, enthusiastic exponents of a corporative state (Ständestaat) or corporative organization (ständischer Aufbau) were at hand to act as engineers for an uncharted future—in fact, a future which occasionally offered faint glimpses of perpetuity. Some of the corporative “soap bubbles,” as Max Weber once termed them, quickly burst while others remained intact. Some of the bubble-blowers were swept on by the revolutionary forces or they gathered by the wayside to appraise the residue of their theories. In any case, the period from 1933 to the outbreak of the present war has been sufficient to allow for a survey of the corporative developments in Germany in the light of their theoretical background and institutional expression.

In his address at the 200th convocation of the University of Chicago, June 11, 1940, President Hutchins invited American youth to reexamine the principles which make life worth living.

This enterprise is most urgently necessary in removing the intellectual unpreparedness of the nation. Far worse than the military and economic deficiencies in equipment and armament are the spiritual dissensions among the various groups of our time. In the universal conflict those nations will prevail whose unity results from spontaneous and free devotion to values which are recognized as worth living and dying for. We can reintegrate the nation, when we succeed in breaking the continuous secularization which, parallel to the rapid industrialization after the Civil War, is undermining the ethos of American life. The ethos which made this commonwealth great, was the fighting spirit of enlightenment. The backbone of the political principles of the Constitution, is the spirit of the Christian Law of Nature; that means political freedom as the fullfilment of the rules of the Almighty. This unity between the three spheres: nature, man and God was discarded by the process of secularization. The ethics of enlightenment shifted to the demand for universal comfort and for good living. The attitude of a boundless optimism prevailed which considered history an unending process of perfection. It was thought that this state of continuous improvement would result from the scientific organization of social and political institutions; their progress would eliminate eventually what the less scientific past had ascribed to the finiteness and sinfulness of man.

This article traces Machiavelli's indebtedness to Sallust in his discussion of Agathocles the Sicilian in chapter 9 of The Prince. In distinguishing between virtù and glory, Machiavelli was influenced by Sallust's discussion of Catiline and Caesar, and of true and false glory, in the Bellum Catilinae. Writing to Caesar at the height of his power, Sallust needed to negotiate a delicate political situation that was in some ways analogous to Machiavelli's own difficult position vis-à-vis the Medici. Just as, in addressing Caesar, Sallust points up the difference between Caesar as he was and as he might have been, so in the example of Agathocles Machiavelli presents the Medici with a choice between mere virtù and the glory achieved by the really excellent men. It was the prospect of this glory that Machiavelli held out to the Medici in the concluding chapter of The Prince.

This essay seeks to explain the contribution that Indian tradition can make to development theory and to assess the possibility of evolving a “new” development in India based on some of the basic values of this tradition.

“What shall be done with Germany upon her defeat?” For many months prior to the surrender of the Wehrmacht this vital question evoked a host of conflicting proposals, official and unofficial, in both Military Government planning staffs and in higher policy-formation circles. Despite many differences, these proposals uniformly demanded immediate disarmament, demilitarization, and—denazification.

Early plans called for the occupation of Germany with the objective of insuring that she never again would threaten her neighbors and the rest of the world. The demilitarization and disarmament of the German armed forces was undertaken rapidly and resolutely by our occupation forces and those of our Allies as a preliminary step in securing this objective. But the more difficult task of denazification—that is, the permanent elimination of the institutions, leadership, and psychology in German life which produced and supported the Nazi regime—is still far from completed.

In The Morality of Freedom, Joseph Raz has challenged the anti-perfectionism of orthodox liberal political theory and proposed an alternative form of liberalism based on perfectionist moral premises. Raz maintain that his theory of political morality qualifies as a “liberal” theory in view of the pride of place it gives “autonomy” considered as an intrinsic human good. Nevertheless, autonomy, according to Raz, is valuable only when exercised in the pursuit of morally upright ends. The principal point of contact between Raz's theory and leading antiperfectionist versions of liberalism is his endorsement of a qualified version of J. S. Mill's “harm principle.” Raz argues that, though the law can and should discourage “victimless immortalities” by noncoercive means, it should not criminalize victimless wrongdoing. The article argues that Raz's claims are strongest where his substantive position is weakest. Perfectionist conservatives and antiperfectionist liberals are correct to maintain that Razian perfectionism cannot supply a ground for rejecting coercive legislation to uphold public morality as a matter of principle.

THE election of Leo XIII on February 20, 1878, made a deep and rather favorable impression on the French statesman, Léon Gambetta. Quite inadvertently, he recorded it for posterity when, on the very day of Leo's election, he wrote to his mistress:

They have elected a new pope, the elegant and refined Cardinal Pecci, bishop of Perugia. … This Italian, more diplomat than priest, has overcome all the intrigues of the Jesuits and the foreign clergy; he is pope, and the name of Leo XIII which he has taken seems to me to be a most favorable omen. I hail this occasion so full of promise.

This article argues that issues of war and foreign affairs predominate in Machiavelli's Florentine Histories, a work generally taken to be devoted to the internal politics of Florence. The well-known narrative of the rise and fall of Medici rule is in fact driven by a counternarrative of the rise of mercenaries such as Francesco Sforza to the point of becoming the true arbiters of Italian affairs. The Florentine Histories lays out the progressive disarming of Italian powers, details the rise of a corrupt system of foreign affairs dominated by mercenary arms and their attendant papal meddling, and urgently counsels statesmen to arm their cities with arms of their own. Seeking to reframe interpretive approaches in this manner, the article sheds new light on Machiavelli's teaching on the desirability of well-managed domestic discords as they relate to military preparedness.

The article consists chiefly in an examination of the Republic, but that examination attempts to determine the place of the Republic in relation to Plato's other works (especially the Laws and the Statesman) as well as their place in relation to it. This comparative effort permits a more precise specification than would otherwise be possible of the most important questions which are raised in those works and of the intention of the author in treating those questions as he does.

Benedict Spinoza is the first philosophical proponent of liberal democracy. In his Theologico-Political Tractate he calls for the liberation of philosophy from theology and for the subordination of religion to politics. Though Spinoza may have not influenced the American Founding Fathers directly, both the clarity and the paradoxes of his arguments are perhaps the best guide to understanding better the present-day conflicts over religion and politics in the United States. Spinoza's insistence on the prerogative of the political sovereign to exercise absolute authority in the sphere of moral action necessarily complicates religious values. But the “inconveniences” resulting from liberal democracy are justified in terms of justice.

THE common note of most writing about strategic policy is that it accepts the governmental framework within which strategic policy-making proceeds in the United States as given, largely beyond analysis or substantial change. This tendency is quite natural and justifiable. Military force is presumably in the service of the nation's fundamental values. A nation's form of government is obviously basic to its ideals and purposes. It is important, however, for the defense analyst as well as the interested citizen to approach the relation of military policy and governmental institutions from a reversed perspective, one that seeks to identify the constraints that the American governmental system and the consent requirements that it establishes impose on effective strategic policy development and operations.

The recent historical process in Eastern Europe has been the reverse of the evolution in colonial matters. In other parts of the world, former colonies reached a degree of complete independence. In East Europe, formerly independent states acquired the peculiar status of semi-dependent colonies. Nazi Germany applied colonial methods in her dealings with European states and invented various categories of protectorates and semi-dependencies. One of the new categories was that of the countries known as satellite states. This meant that some countries, remaining theoretically sovereign members of the family of nations, lost their independence and particularly their freedom of action in international and domestic affairs. The satellite states were never considered by Germany as equal partners but only as more or less reliable “Hilfs-völker.” Equality and cooperation in international relations was in conceivable to the Nazi mind.

Every age seems to have some dominating central idea, and every particular political system surely has some dominating central idea from which radiate all the institutions, processes, and the texture of life in that country. As Tocqueville long ago said, the dominating idea of our age, and of our political order in particular, is the idea of equality. Equality is therefore at once for us the source of our political benefits and also the source of our defects and dangers. That is to say, every dominating idea is the one that determines for the society its likeliest and greatest benefits and dangers, because the central idea is the one that can do the greatest and most pervasive good and by the same token also the greatest harm. Equality is for us that central principle, the one we have to grapple with and wrest good from, and likewise the principle from which come our greatest dangers. Equality is the political problem for mankind in the present age.

In May, 1968, France was saved from revolution not primarily by de Gaulle and his generals but by the French Communist Party. Nine million striking workers occupied the factories. Militants among the students and young unemployed workers had proven themselves more than ready to play the role of vanguard at the barricades. The peasantry had begun to move from passive grumbling to direct action, fearful that the end of agricultural tariffs in July would further depress their hard lot. Even the middleclass professionals, disenchanted with the hierarchical rigidities and the olympian paternalism of Gaullist society had risen to assert their rights to free expression and meaningful participation. All means of communication and transport and all financial agencies were either directly or indirectly under the control of the workers. At will they could have deprived Paris and other cities of food, water, fuel, electricity and gas.

Today the term political theory has two main meanings. It means the study of great thinkers who have, more or less systematically or polemically, written on matters political. This is the sense in which the term has been used in this century, down to the “behavioral revolution.” We shall adhere to that usage. Since the “behavioral revolution,” the term has also come to mean a theory, or theories, formal or axiomatic in structure, on subjects political but not traditionally dealt with by political theory in the first sense. This kind of political thought we shall call formal (political) theory.