Friedrich Naumann (1860–1919) was born into that generation of Germans whose Weltanschauung had begun to accommodate an emerging world of science, technology, nationalism, and power politics. When he entered upon university studies in 1879 the Reich had been established, the German industrial revolution was well under way, and the scientific-historical outlook had begun to replace philosophy as the prevailing national temper. These historical currents were presently gathered into his powerful intellect, bent upon understanding itself and the times. This quest mirrored in an extraordinary way the political tendencies and intellectual moods of Wilhelmian Germany. All of its foibles and conceits, its doubts and ambition were freely exhibited in Naumann's writing. A prose style outstanding in modern German letters for its clarity and easy grace facilitated Naumann's task. Few works in German on political subjects share the literary qualities of Naumann's prose; his personal archive of Wilhelmian times can yield pleasure as well as secrets to the historian.

Throughout the ages it has been held that leisure is the basis of culture. This view can be found in the Old Testament and in Plato, in Burke, Marx, Veblen, and in T. S. Eliot. Whether they were glad for it or sad, people seem to have always taken it for granted that in order to have culture one must first have leisure. Applicable to society as well as to individuals, this rule was put concisely by Dr. Johnson as follows: “All intellectual improvement arises from leisure; all leisure arises from one working for another.”

In recent years, scholars have been increasingly applying “behavioral” approaches to the study of Chinese politics. One interesting strain of this is the work of Lucian Pye and Richard Solomon, who stress the study of Chinese “political culture” analyzed mainly in terms of an “authority crisis.” Solomon's explication is the more detailed and elaborate. Part of his thesis is that harmony and peace are “basic and enduring political values in the Confucian tradition,” and therefore “questions of the handling of social conflict constitute a major area of tension in the Chinese political culture.” The Chinese hopes for order and believes that this comes about only through strong authority; without such authority there is luan, “chaos.” But the means required to exercise authority create resentment, and resentment becomes the basis for more luan.

This essay argues that Locke's Reasonableness of Christianity provides a morally robust argument for religious pluralism—one which avoids the pitfalls of relativism and official neutrality by elucidating the need for a civil religion of toleration. The work thus contains Locke's friendly critique of his more radical Enlightenment contemporaries who had openly debunked the Bible. This critique is friendly, I argue, because Locke ultimately agrees with Spinoza and Hobbes about revelation, miracles, and religion's psychological causes. While Locke joined these thinkers in a common project to make Christianity less sacrificial and friendlier to enlightened selfishness, his analysis also reveals the need to retain some of its self-abnegating spirit in liberalism's service. But Locke has difficulty accounting for that spirit itself, and this problem in one of liberalism's original theorists may help explain the dissatisfactions and anxieties troubling tolerant societies today.

What moderns call technology is requisite to liberal democracy, for without the increase of wealth, knowledge, and opportunity that technology provides, the ruling majority could not be an enlightened middle class. Nevertheless, critics point to advancing technology's harmful side, with some hoping to prevent these harms by tight controls and others despairing that technology lies beyond our control. In a neglected 1858–59 lecture and related speeches, Abraham Lincoln wrestled with these issues and their implications for democratic statecraft. Although convinced that “discoveries and inventions” had rescued humankind from savage beginnings, produced abundance, and put genuine democracy within reach, Lincoln recognized that advancing technology alone would not guarantee freedom, but might bring new forms of mastery. Lincolnian statecraft seeks to moderate or limit this advance not through stringent controls, but by a moral teaching that builds on the natural right to oneself and includes a comprehensive doctrine of labor.

In the beginning of his Politics Aristotle argues that “man is by nature a political animal.” In fact man is more a political animal than any herding animal, for “man alone of the animals has speech,” “man alone of the animals has reason,” “man alone of the animals has logos.” In other contexts the word logos can also be translated as word, account, argument, or ratio. Logos is connected with the verb legōo which means to speak and to gather, to pick out, to select, to count. The English words collect, select, and elect are related to the same verb. Logosis selected, elected, and chosen speech, meaningful speech, thoughtful speech. The traditional definition of man as the rational animal, stemming from Aristotle, goes back to this statement, that man alone of the animals possesses logos, possesses thoughtful speech. Aristotle goes on to say:

Until more or less recently, few students of international affairs have been preoccupied with the theoretical aspects of their field. To the extent that theory is distinguished from history, law and science, this is especially true. Historians have sought to uncover the facts and recite them with the most fastidious regard for the circumstances of time and place. Lawyers have tried to detect in the case law of international agreements and treaties the normative structure of international society. Political scientists have increasingly turned to new scientific methods and statistical techniques designed to measure public opinion and its influence on foreign policy. Few scholars have concerned themselves with the fundamental characteristics of international society or of good or bad foreign policy. In this intellectual environment any explicit, systematic theory of international relations has had to await a threefold development. It has required a broader conception of the proper methods for studying international affairs, a clearer identification of basic concepts and “laws,” and a more serious discussion of fundamental theoretical problems like the relation of theory to concrete problems.

A problem within liberal constitutionalism is determining whether the majority actually consents to its government, and, in particular, to those extraordinary acts that take place in the silence of the law. This paper explores this problem in the U.S. context by presenting Thomas Jefferson's understanding of the impeachment power. Jefferson preferred a theory of impeachment that, like his theory of coordinate review, would allow each department to participate in the impeachment process, because he believed that executive participation would improve the law bringing its own character, or will, to it. As an alternative to the more common political understanding of impeachment, which leans toward legislative exclusivity, and the dominant legal understanding, which tends toward judicial finality, Jefferson's theory offers a way for the people to judge whether a particular act of lawlessness is in the public good.

The philosophical framework for Lord Acton's theory of nationality, or to be more accurate his theory of multinationality, derives both from Aristotle and from Christian thinkers of the Middle Ages and the early modern period. In Aristotle he found the view that the nature of the state is to be a plurality. Aquinas gave him “a very large element of political liberalism,” while Leibnitz contributed the idea of development, particularly the notion that development involves continuity and progress. Combining these points of view, Acton embraced a patently individualistic position, believing firmly that only the individual man possesses moral and political rights. Classes, races and states are at best chance groupings, at worst tortuous human inventions, and consequently have no inherent rights. It is “easier to find people fit to govern themselves,” according to Acton, “than people fit to govern others.”

In ancient Greece and ancient China, small states engaged in intense military competition and incessant warfare. In such contexts, there was naturally much emphasis on the training of soldiers. One might have expected state-sponsored physical education to develop as a by-product of the need to train soldiers, but the historical record shows that ancient Greek states placed far more emphasis on physical education compared to their counterparts in ancient China. This essay attempts to (partly) explain the divergent outcomes with reference to the idea of citizenship. The first part outlines the practice and philosophy of state-sponsored physical education in ancient Greece and ancient China and addresses the question of why the two ancient civilizations should be compared in this respect. The main body of the article discusses the political differences between ancient Greece and ancient China that help to explain the different outcomes regarding state-sponsored physical education. The last part ends with some normative reflections that may be relevant for present-day societies.

John Carroll was disturbed about the future of Catholicism as he surveyed the scene in the aftermath of the American Revolution. As a supporter of the patriot movement he was pleased that the policy of religious toleration allowed Catholics to participate fully in the political life of the new nation. No doubt he also perceived that the wartime alliance with Catholic France had done much to improve the status of the church among his countrymen. But these positive features were outweighed by the disorganization of the church and the apathy of her ministers. There were only about two dozen priests in the new republic, several of whom were too old to be of any use. But even the younger ones seemed listless and demoralized.

Apartheid and international monetary reform have received much attention in recent years yet littleof the discussion of these issues has linked them in any meaningful way. The call for changes in the international monetary system has been based upon an alleged insufficiency in international liquidity anda need for an adjustment mechanism for secular balance of payments disequilibria. Opposition to apartheid, South Africa's segregationist racial policy, has been based upon humanitarian concern for the condition of black Africans in that country.

This article explores the Spanish franquist regime's attempts to resolve a succession crisis, as the death of Francisco Franco appeared imminent in the late 1960's. It argues that Franco established the mechanisms for a smooth succession to the posts of head of state and head of government. However, these mechanisms failed to achieve Franco's major goal: the continuation of authoritarian rule after his death. Ironically, Franco's apparently ingenious “solution” to the dilemmas of succession facilitated a democratic transition that would have horrified the dictator.

Leo Strauss wrote only rarely about American thought, but he pointed his students and readers toward the “high adventure” of the American political tradition as a serious encounter with the great questions of political philosophy. Strauss saw American theory as a contest—one fought less between Americans than within them—pitting modernity's “first wave”, with its appeal to reason and natural right, against the more radical individualism and the historicism of later modern doctrine. Religion and classical rationalism, offering their own standards of a right above opinion, had been historically the allies of “first wave”, modernity, but those voices, Strauss recognized, were growing weaker in American life. In recent American teaching and culture, by contrast, Strauss saw that the increasingly dominant ethics of self—interest and success, other political inadequacies aside, were incapable of speaking to the highest aspirations or winning the deepest allegiance of the young. By reviving classical teaching, Strauss also sought to contribute to the rearticulation and reanimation of the American ideal.

This essay examines Aristotle's account of justice as a virtue in the Nicomachean Ethics by considering two related parts of it: Aristotle's elevated account of justice as lawfulness and his description of equity as a virtue. I focus on moral rather than legal questions by emphasizing Aristotle's identification of justice as lawfulness with complete virtue, and a broad sense of equity as superlatively good character. Some of the more difficult passages in book 5 prove to be tied together by the question of the goodness of justice and I argue that Aristotle points to a specific confusion in this regard characteristic of virtuous people. I conclude that Aristotle's critique of our ordinary opinions about justice offers crucial, albeit limited, support for the superiority of the contemplative life announced at the end of book 10.

The blame for the environmental disaster that threatens to overtake us unless something is done to avert it is often laid at the door of the Bible and the tradition that comes out of it. Typical of this trend is Lynn White's landmark essay, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis” (1967), which traces the West's ruthless exploitation of nature to the biblical injunction that human beings are to “subdue” the earth and exercise “dominion” over all other living things. Ironically, White's indictment all but coincided with the triumph of an older theory the object of which was to demonstrate against the Enlightenment that, far from being hostile to modern science, the glory of our civilization and the instrument of its conquest of nature, the Christian tradition was the principal agent of its emergence. Christianity would thus be simultaneously and for the same reason responsible for what is best and what is worst in the modern world. The article challenges the premise that these two theories share, namely, that modern science is a child of premodern Christian thought. It begins with a restatement of what was once the commonly accepted view of our relationship to nonhuman nature and ends with a brief account of the essential limitations of modern natural science.

In several key passages in Thomas Hobbes's understudied translation of Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War, Hobbes's Pericles directs audiences to distrust rhetoric in favor of calculative self-interest, inward-focused affective states, and an epistemic reliance on sovereignty. Hobbes's own intervention via his translation of Thucydides involves similar rhetorical moves. By directing readers to learn from Thucydides, Hobbes conceals his own rhetorical appeals in favor of sovereignty while portraying rhetoric undermining sovereignty as manipulative, self-serving, and representative of the entire category of “rhetoric.” Hobbes's double redescription of rhetoric is an important starting point for an early modern project: appeals that justify a desired political order are characterized as “right reason,” “the law of nature,” or “enlightenment,” while rhetoric constituting solidarities or publics outside the desired order is condemned. Hobbes's contribution to this project theorizes rhetoric as a barrier to individual calculations of interest, placing a novel constraint on political life.

In recent years many scholars have contributed to the development of Marxist analyses of urban political economy. At the same time, a smaller number of social and political theorists have examined Marx's political theory and identified his theory of public and private life as a central component of his politics. Too often, Marxist analyses of urban political economy do not fully incorporate Marx's political theory. Analyses of Marx's politics, on the other hand, tend to overlook the dimensions of the modern city which illuminate his theory of public and private. This article brings together Marx's urban theory and political theory and suggests that they are, in fact, very much intertwined.

That politics should not be a matter either of impulse and whim or of pure ratiocination, hardly anyone will dispute. But there is no settled agreement on the precise role that reason should play in political decisions. Disagreement is aggravated because those who have written on the question usually intended to correct some prevalent error and in their fervor have often fostered other, equally pernicious, errors. As a result, discussion about the nature of political reasoning has tended to oscillate between extreme positions that hardly anyone would uphold consistently. This tendency is illustrated once again in the recent attacks on Rationalism, where the authors, in criticizing the Rationalist misuse of reason, seem to identify all abstract reasoning with Rationalism and appear to distrust all general principles.

The concept of the “generation gap,” like so many notions used to explain the present dislocations in society, has gained wide currency because it is a fundamentally soothing idea. To troubled adults it conveys the implication that the alienation between themselves and their children is a wholly natural phenomenon, inevitable and therefore healthy. It relieves the parent from the need to worry. For the rebellious young themselves the term has ideological uses, again through the implication that what they do is natural and normal, inevitable and desirable.