My intention is: to try to face a certain central social problem in its connection with the concept of leisure. And I hope that a solution of that problem, or at least some ways towards a solution, may become more clear and visible. This is a rather modest purpose (because problems are still not solved when a solution has become visible or even when some ways of a solution have become more clear than before).

I shall not consider the social problem from a formally sociological point of view or from a formally political point of view, but from a philosophical point of view. It shall not be spoken of in such a way that the field of vision is completely filled with it. The point-of-view does not lie so close to the concrete phenomena that our attention is occupied and consumed by their immediate impact. Philosophical consideration means that a certain subject is considered within the horizon of the total and universal reality; it belongs to the essence and nature of a really philosophical question, that not only this question itself comes into play, but that—onsidering, meditating this question—one is obliged to bring into play the totality of the world, even God and the world. In such a view the discussion loses perhaps some actual interest for the politician or for an immediately-involved man. But on the other hand, it might be that deeper possibilities of a solution become perceivable, just because the totality of the real world, especially the totality of human nature, comes into the range of vision. It might be, too, that there are social and political problems which, from the mere viewpoint of sociology and politics, cannot be solved. And perhaps this possibility is relevant to our present case. I would like to formulate the claim very modestly. In question is a sort of attempt, a proposal, to view the problem from a new and familiar standpoint. There may result an insight into the social problem—which possibly can become useful within the sphere of politics.

In recent times, the issues surrounding crime and punishment have seldom been discussed from the vantage point of political philosophy. Instead, they have tended to become the province of lawyers, psychologists, and specialists in ethics or the philosophy of language. Whatever the merits of their respective contributions may be, such writers usually have assumed that the basic questions of political legitimacy and the state's authority to enforce criminal law have been settled. In effect, they ask: given a state which already possesses a legitimate system of criminal justice, whom should the state punish (if it does at all), why, and under what circumstances?

ItIs A well-known human tendency to continue applying remedies after the problem for which they are suitable has been solved. Concentration on a particular difficulty becomes habitual to such a degree that its disappearance may not be immediately realized. And new problems may take its place for some time without being noticed.

In this analysis I explore the key political and military events that led to the acquisition of state power by the Movimento Popular de Libertacao (MPLA) in Angola and the Frente de Libertacao de Mocambique (FRELIMO) in Mozambique during 1975–1976. At the same time, I discuss the decisive role played by the “guerrilla counterstate,” which the MPLA and FRELIMO movements constructed out of their national liberation party organizations, as a social formation to guide the cultural and political process of rapid social change. Indeed, I argue that one can point to the MPLA's and FRELIMO's divergent experiences with administering their counterstate institutions during the struggle for national liberation as a decisive variable in accounting for their respective successes and failures at institutionalizing social revolution after independence.

It is not difficult to discern the historic factors which have brought the Middle East into its present position of “crisis area” in the foreign relations of the United States. The reasons why we have gotten from there to here, from the somnolent state of Middle Eastern affairs in, say, the year 1914 and their still sleepy condition in 1939 to the split-second enmities and antagonisms of the mid-1970's have been pointed up by events of recent history. First of all there was the rise of nationalism. Evident in Egypt in the late nineteenth century, it spread slowly to the other Arabic-speaking peoples of the region. Nationalism in the Middle East has become extremely important during the last twenty-five years.

Rousseau speaks of his last work, The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, as an informal record of conversations of his soul with itself in its quest for his—our—naturel purged of artifice and convention. In the course of these conversations he addresses many of the problems that he explores in his other writings: man's place in the scheme of things, hence God, divine justice, immortality; freedom; the contrasts between the active, citizen life and the circumscribed, solitary life; what we owe to our fellows and what we owe to ourselves; amour-propre, shame, and amour de soi; the conditions for individual happiness, its kinds, and how they might (or might not) compose with public happiness. However, in the Reveries he addresses these problems from an explicitly nonpolitical perspective. While he says that he did not reduce his reflections—meditations, reveries—about them to a system, his account of them is remarkably comprehensive and carefully crafted.

In her well-known piece on Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt wrote that “posthumous fame… seems to be the lot of the unclassifiable ones.” It is achieved by “those whose work neither fits the existing order nor introduces a new genre that lends itself to future classification.” If she is right, then there may be some hope that Richard McKeon will one day have his moment. For McKeon (who was, in fact, a friend of Arendt) is eminently unclassifiable. Born in 1900, he studied philosophy both with the great French medievalist Étienne Gilson and with John Dewey. He was a twentieth-century American pragmatist who sought to revolutionize philosophy so that it could deal with the novel challenges of a technological age. Yet he was also a brilliant scholar of classical and medieval thought, who wrote such articles as “Poetry and Philosophy in the Twelfth Century,” “Rhetoric in the Middle Ages,” and “The Hellenistic and Roman Foundations of the Tradition of Aristotle in the West.”

This paper offers a new account of Nietzsche's critique of morality in the first treatise of his On the Genealogy of Morality. According to the general view, Nietzsche places political revenge at the center of slave morality: the priest invents slave morality in order to rule the noble. I argue that this view is incomplete, for Nietzsche's deeper critique reveals that the priest's revenge is not purely political but also radically ontological. Ultimately, the priest aims at supplanting not just the noble but also the rule of nature. This reading reveals the priest's attempt to transform the natural order of rank through imagining the human being as subject to the omnipotent God of monotheism, i.e., the “just God.” This interpretation not only broadens our understanding of Nietzsche's critique of morality but also clarifies its purpose, namely, to show us how the demand for morality can blind us to the world's truths.

Ludwig Wittgenstein and Michael Oakeshott are often labeled conservative thinkers, and taken to theorize rigid limits to individual agency and criticism. Tracing several modes of affinity between the work of Wittgenstein and Oakeshott, one can recognize the conventionality and rule-governed character of linguistic practices and yet affirm a deeply individualistic account of agency and action. Each thinker respectively characterizes the individual as located within a context of action that is richly structured by intersubjective rules and practices. Yet each also recognizes an ineluctable dimension of individuality and contingency to action that surpasses mere rule following or the reprise of conventional practice. The very situatedness of the individual agent within a framework of linguistic practices shared with others provides the friction that enables individual criticism and transgressive political action. Wittgenstein and Oakeshott thus present a perspective on political agency and criticism that is a salient alternative to both conservative and radical views.

Edmund Burke's emphasis on emotional phenomena is often seen as a rejection of reason. The relationship between reason and the emotions in Burke's work is paralleled by the relationships between the individual and society and between rights and duties. Emotions support duties because they bind us to social life and a particular social location. Burke filters rights claims through our emotional attachment to specific circumstances, thus creating social rights of man in contrast to the individualistic, abstract rights of men of the social contract theorists. Prejudice is presented as an example of a Burkean filter for rights that moderates rights claims by binding individuals to society. Thus, Burke sees reason and emotion as interconnected phenomena that support the balancing of the claims of both individual and the community.

Republican leaders have always sought to “crack” the Democratic South in the hope of making their party a majority one in all of the major sections of the country. The current proposals of Senator Karl E. Mundt of South Dakota for uniting northern Republicans and southern Democrats are not new; they have been tried in the past with little success. This was especially true of the post-Reconstruction years when the memories of Republican ascendancy in the South during die early years of Reconstruction were still fresh and vivid.

The present crisis has generated intense debate over the instruments of foreign policy the United States has at its disposal and controversy over their use in particular stages of a dispute or conflict. The debate has centered over the meaning and use of power and force. A little more than a decade ago, writing On Violence in an era when its primary manifestation was within national boundaries, the American political philosopher, the late Hannah Arendt, sought to distinguish between violence and power, saying: “… power always stands in need of numbers, whereas violence up to a point … relies on implements.” Writers differ on concepts such as power and violence. Power for some is conceived as the ability of the individual or the group to impose its will on others. Power for Arendt implied the human ability to act in concert —potestas in populo; without a people or group there is no power in politics. Power for individuals and groups is linked with prestige and authority. In politics, authority requires respect either for a person or an office; its enemy is contempt or laughter directed at the person or office. In both foreign relations and domestic affairs, “violence appears as a last resort to keep … power … intact against individual challengers — the foreign enemy, the native criminal …” or to overthrow authority. It would seem, therefore, that force and violence are the prerequisites of power and power nothing but a facade. In a violent world, it is force that counts not power which is dependent on force.

Spain entered the twentieth century as a relatively underdeveloped nation still deeply rooted in her traditional past. Spanish life had barely begun to experience the stresses of social and economic transformation that recent scholars have identified with the modernization process. Toward the end of the last century, Spanish industry grew at a rapid pace, particularly in the Basque and Catalan regions, but the nation as a whole continued to lag behind the rest of Western Europe in the years before 1914. Although the recently formed trade union movements expanded in response to the new complex of urban-industrial problems, their organizational and political strength remained ineffective until World War I. In the other regions of Spain an agrarian economy, replete with strong anarchist movements, dominated and determined a social order in which provincialism, widespread subsistence living standards, and extensive illiteracy persisted.

Recent interpretations of Rousseau suggest that autonomy is the master concept by which to understand his justification of the state. The Rousseauian state is legitimate insofar as it enables individuals to obey only their own wills and thus to be free. Autonomy-based interpretations cannot adequately account for Rousseau's remarks on the role of the state in securing a collective form of happiness through political community. These interpretations incorrectly construe collective happiness as pertaining only to how civic-minded citizens might be psychologically motivated to obey the state's dictates, rather than to what makes the state legitimate. By contrast, I offer a new interpretation according to which the Rousseauian state is justified because it enables a mutually constitutive relationship between the autonomy of individuals and the happiness that stems from participation in political community.

I must begin by expressing my deep appreciation to Paul Rowe for bringing my work on theopolitics before a different audience than the ones to which I am accustomed and for bringing his own expertise in political science and political theory to bear on my writings. The depth and incisiveness of his critique provide me an opportunity to rethink and clarify my ideas. It also gives me the opportunity to prove that I do not deserve being mentioned in the same sentence as Che Guevara and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi!

The similarities between postwar France and Italy are striking. Both countries are traditionally Catholic. Both emerged from the Second World War with vital Communist organizations enjoying widespread popular support—owing in large measure to the leading roles the Communists played in their national resistance movements during World War II. Since the war, both the French and Italian Communist political parties-—by themselves—could count on commanding between one-fifth and one-fourth of the vote. France and Italy also emerged from the war with significant Christian Democratic movements and parties—-much stronger than analogous groupings in prewar days. Both countries had threatening Communist movements powerful enough to make credible attempts at seizing power without the aid of Soviet troops. And in both countries the Christian Democratic movement was a major obstacle to Communist designs. In both countries Social Democratic movements reemerged, but inferior to the Communists in cohesionand poised awkwardly between massive Communist and Catholic subcultures. In both countries a substantial part of the labor movement was dominated, not by gradualists, but by Marxist-Leninists who challengedthe very legitimacy of the regime. Not surprisingly, the character of the opposition reflected deep traditions of civic alienation, skepticism, and apathy. Finally, both countries have suffered from an ill-developed history of democratic practices, and have been notably subject to governmental instability.

Edmund Burke was at once a chief exponent of the Ciceronian doctrine of natural law and a chief opponent of the “rights of man.” In our time, which is experiencing simultaneously a revival of interest in natural-law theory and an enthusiasm for defining “human rights” that is exemplified by the United Nations' lengthy declaration, Burke's view of the natural juridic order deserves close attention.

Unlike Bolingbroke and Hume, whose outward politics in some respects resembled the great Whig statesman's, Burke was a pious man. “The most important questions about the human race Burke answered … from the Church of England's catechism.” He takes for granted a Christian cosmos, in which a just God has established moral principles for man's salvation. God has given man law, and with that law, rights; such, succinctly, is Burke's premise in all moral and juridical questions.

The British general strike of May, 1926, was a strange event. Over two and a half million men left their work and for nine days closed down the British economy. It was the greatest strike ever to take place in Western Europe and it evoked much class bitterness. And yet many middle- and upper-class Englishmen who had been bitter and angry during the strike came eventually to look back on it as a gay adventure which showed how peaceful and sensible Englishmen were. They were proud that they had fought so great an industrial battle to a conclusion without a single death or even the firing of a single shot. Alfred Duff Cooper (Lord Norwich) who was a young back-bencher at the time of the strike (he later became Secretary of State for War and First Lord of the Admiralty) wrote in 1953 in his autobiography: “… it [the strike] threatened the survival of parliamentary government, and it brought the country nearer to revolution than it has ever been.” But despite this, English good sense triumphed: “Happily, no grave errors of judgment were made by either side and the remarkable result was achieved of complete victory without vindictiveness on the one side or rancour on the other. The air was cleared and from that day to this relations between capital and labour have been happier in Great Britain.”.