Every state has a constitution—a body of principles, institutions, laws, and customs that forms the framework of government—but not every state is a constitutional state. The latter is distinguished by a commitment to constitutionalism, which in essence is the idea that political life ought to be carried on according to procedures and rules that paradoxically are in some degree placed beyond politics: procedures in other words that are fundamental. Nothing so positive as a written constitution, but rather the belief that the law as the embodiment of a society's most important values is powerful, characterizes government under the rule of law.

Debates over natural law routinely confuse three quite different sets of issues. First, there are the properly philosophical questions of (i) whether a natural law exists, and (ii) whether positive laws are valid completely apart from their moral specifications. Second, there are questions that properly belong to political theory. These include, (iii) how a constitution ought to allocate responsibility to make natural justice effective, and (iv) how a particular system of positive law handles this issue. Third, assuming that a judiciary is limited by written law, it can still be asked whether this necessarily prohibits judicial uses of natural law theory. Questions at these different levels are sufficiently different that what it takes to solve a question at one level does not necessarily carry over to the others. It is vain, therefore, to search for a single method that brings closure on these issues.

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.

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.

Settlement workers during the Progressive era were probably more committed to political action than any other group of welfare workers before or since. Charity organization workers also cooperated on occasion in political reform projects, but Robert Hunter, the itinerant radical, settlement worker, and charity expert was probably right in 1902, even if he exaggerated, when he decided that the settlement worker and the charity worker had basically different temperaments. The charity worker was hesitant to get involved with reform, Hunter decided; he had a philosophy of “don't, don't” and was constantly troubled by the fear that his relief would destroy independence. The settlement worker, on the other hand, was more often the victim of unbounded enthusiasm than of moral questioning. “He is constantly doing, urging; he is constantly pressing forward, occasionally tilting at wind mills, at times making mistakes, often perhaps doing injury, but filled with enthusiasm, warmth and purpose, without much question”.

The study of leadership in local government for small- and middle-sized towns is a neglected phase of political science research. For many years scholars have accounted for the urban boss and machine; but its complementary counterpart at the grassroots has been taken for granted. Millions of Americans prefer to live and govern themselves in towns. Their politics warrants analysis not only because it will continue as a vital and characteristic contribution to our way of life but also because it frequently plays a superior rôle in state and national representation than it numerically is entitled to do

The legal system of Thailand is a product of history. For 10 centuries it evolved in an eclectic process. Territorial expansion and external threats eventuated in new legal values and institutions. Contact with the West caused an amalgamation of indigenous and foreign laws to maintain and strengthen the kingdom. Today the law is a vital factor upholding national unity and progress during a time of international tension in Southeast Asia. In this article I propose to survey the development of law in Thailand and analyze its role in the political affairs of the nation.

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.

This article assesses the recent use of contractarian strategies for the justification of cosmopolitan distributive principles. It deals in particular with the cosmopolitan critique of political membership and tries to reject the claim that political communities are arbitrary for the scope of global justice. By focusing on the circumstances of justice, the nature of the parties, the veil of ignorance, and the sense of justice, the article tries to show that the cosmopolitan critique of political membership modifies the contractarian premises in a way that is both unwarranted and unnecessary. While failing to establish principles of global distributive justice, existing cosmopolitan adaptations of the social contract device simply weaken the method's justificatory potential.

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.

Charles I was charged in the indictment before the High Court of Justice, at the trial before his execution, with entertaining “a wicked design to erect and uphold in himself an unlimited and tyrannical power to rule according to his will.” To this end he had “traitorously and maliciously levied war against the present parliament.” It is usual to scoff at this. How could a king commit treason? Indeed he could not. Yet if he had set out to make himself a tyrant this was a grave offense which, though unknown to English law courts, had often been accounted in political theory as deserving death. The issue of treason is therefore without importance: however bad in law, there was certainly no lesser charge on which to bring a king to execution. The important question concerns tyranny.

My direct experience with the Bulgarian aspect of the interallied rivalries following the Second World War extended from the planning of postwar policy in the Department of State in 1943–44 through the first year (1944–45) of American participation in the implementation of the Bulgarian armistice.

The political thought of Fyodor Dostoevsky grows out of his opposition to nihilism, atheistic humanism, and socialism in much the same way as the philosophy of Plato grew out of his opposition to the sophists. Indeed, the parallel of Dostoevsky's thought with that of Plato is to be seen in some further aspects of this fundamental opposition. Both the Russian master of the novel and the Hellenic founder of political science confronted adversaries for whom “Man is the measure of all things” and each based his opposition on the principle “God is the Measure,” to use Plato's formulation. This declaration, echoing like a thunderclap across more than twenty centuries of history, found consummate expression in the last great work of each writer: the Laws and The Brothers Karamazov.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, as a few republics began to enjoy more prolonged moments of political stability, Latin American leaders developed a mania for economic progress. Under the influence of a heterodox form of positivism and in many instances inclined to emulate United States social and economic models, progress-oriented Latin Americans looked upon classical liberalism and the bourgeois, individualistic, profit ethic as the keys to success. Traditional paternalistic devices were repudiated in the interest of converting all members of society who were capable of the transformation — considerable doubt prevailed as to whether Indians, Blacks and various mixed bloods were capable — into competitive, individualistic capitalists whose success in attaining self-reliance and economic independence would propel their nations onward.

The ascension to power of Chile's Christian Democratic Party (PDC) in 1964 generated a great deal of optimism on the future of Latin American politics. Eduardo Frei Montalva, the party's successful presidential candidate, was a thoughtful, politically astute intellectual who preferred careful analysis to florid demagoguery. To a continent enamored of ideologies, his movement proposed a social-Christian value system rooted in individual dignity, in the uniqueness of the human being, in economic pluralism, and in social and political democracy. Roman Catholicism with which the Christian Democrats were associated, but not officially connected, was one of the “few crosscutting and unifying forces” in Latin America and served to legitimize the movement with both traditional and modernizing elites. Frei's party evinced a mass membership with a branch structure3 linked to auxiliary agencies (which provide medical, dental, legal services, and the like). It relied on an efficient, paid bureaucracy rather than a coterie of notables to operate the organizational apparatus; public opinion polls rather than uninformed guesses to chart political strategy; dues and voluntary contributions rather than ”mordidas” and graft for financial sustenance; and specialized organs rather than personalism to aggregate such increasingly important sectors as women, peasants, urban poor, and students under the Christian Democratic standard.

Francois-Etienne, due de Choiseul-Stainville, chief foreign policy-maker of France between 1758 and1770, sought to reverse the Peace of Paris which marked France's humiliating defeat by England in the Seven Years War. The objective of his “Revanche” was the restoration of the prewar maritime, commercial and colonial equilibrium with the British. To accomplish it, he relied on the Family Pact of 1761 with Spain, then the world's third naval power, and on the defensive Franco-Austrian alliance concluded in 1756 and revised in 1759, which Choiseul believed would suffice to keep the European continent at peace while the Bourbon powers concentrated all their forces, military and financial, for a purely naval war with Great Britain.

Scholars have long been under the impression that the doctrines enunciated in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 and 1799 and the Virginia Report of 1800 originated with the authors of those documents, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson. Yet this article demonstrates that it was not either of those two future presidents who concocted what Andrew Jackson would dub “the Virginia Doctrine.” That distinction belongs to Governor Edmund Randolph, a non-signer of the Constitution at the Philadelphia Convention who became a leading voice for ratification in the Virginia Ratification Convention of 1788. The trajectory of Randolph's thinking regarding federalism and the story of his doctrine's effect in 1788 are recounted here. Ironically, the reading of the Constitution that would underpin various outbreaks of sectionalism in the antebellum period and later originated with a Federalist of 1788, not with an opponent of ratification.

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.”.