Radio Havana? Quotations from Chairman Mao? A black liberation group pamphlet? Wrong. These are excerpts from Roman Catholic publications in Latin America. Still regarded by many as one of the bulwarks of the status quo, the Latin-American Church has undergone a startling transformation in the last five years which has moved its official thinking and portions of its elite leadership significantly to the left.

A Few years ago an editor was beaten in Uganda for using the “wrong” forms of the Luganda tongue, which somewhat earlier had been “standardized.” This incident reflects the emotionalism surrounding language issues in the emergent African countries, so desperately seeking a common medium for internal and external communication.

The United Kingdom, already beleaguered in the mid-1970's by a number of serious problems—economic, social, political, diplomatic and even climatic—in addition has had to contend with a far-reaching constitutional crisis. Involving the subject of devolution of power (better known as home rule), it has been described as “the most crucial constitutional issue which has confronted the United Kingdom since it came into being.” The controversy over devolution has reached a new level of intensity since November, 1975, when the government, in an effort to resolve the dispute, published a White Paper entitled Our Changing Democracy: Devolution to Scotland and Wales. This article examines the following aspects of the devolution issue: its background, why it has emerged at this time, why the White Paper was issued, reasons for the hostile reaction to the White Paper, the prospects for parliamentary passage of devolution legislation, and the issue's political repercussions and implications, both domestic and international.

I think of reasoning (or deliberation), arts of the self, and micropolitics as inter-involved modalities of private and public life that are not entirely reducible to one another. You reason, alone or with others, when you ask how to realize a set of goals or to modify them in new circumstances. You practice arts of the self after, say, you have acknowledged that some element in your faith promotes unnecessary suffering for others and/or is inconsonant with other prized elements. That element clings to you or you to it even though another part of you would like it go. An Augustinian might call this a will divided against itself.

Examining the special relations between On the Social Contract and the Constitutional Project for Corsica, this essay argues that Rousseau conceives of constitutionalism on the basis of his understanding of the “natural development” of any state. What is “natural” is a certain order in which developmental periods best emerge, such that any state's disordered development will always result in its premature “death.” The essay explains four aspects of Rousseau's conception of properly ordered political development: the nature of a state's beginning; the relation between the two “great springs” of human conduct; the influence of external nature on human nature and justice; and the inevitable “end” of even the best state.

As Chief of State and head of government, the President is the epicenter of the management of American external relations and the formulation of foreign policy. Not only does he welcome the leaders of other countries who come on summit visits, receive personally the diplomatic emissaries of foreign governments accredited to the United States, and participate in many other formal diplomatic functions, but he also is responsible for executing those segments of the law that pertain to international affairs, for appointing United States diplomats and communicating with other governments, for making treaties, and for initiating and enunciating foreign policy. Addressing himself to the last of these, President Truman cryptically declared: “The President makes foreign policy.” Dean Rusk later commented that this “is not the whole story,” but “it serves very well if one wishes to deal with the matter in five words.”

While numerous methodological and interpretive challenges confront the study of cross-cultural political theory, this essay examines a particular premodern Indian tradition as an example of such difficulties and one way in which they can be overcome. Exploring the problematic ways in which people have interpreted and made use of India's ancient past, it critically examines arguments for the existence of secularism, free elections, and democratic assemblies in the Vedas. Defending what I call a “critical revivalist” position, it is argued that predominant approaches to premodern traditions in contemporary Indian political theory place significant constraints on cross-cultural intelligibility and theory building within the Indian context. To elaborate this point, I shift from a “political” to rājan-oriented categorical register in an effort to reposition current understandings of self-rule (swaraj) in India within a broader rajanical tradition. Finally, this essay explains how contemporary Indian political theory can draw insights from this native tradition without necessarily reverting to familiar Western idioms.

This article examines early modern English public houses and related period miscellany—broadside ballads, conduct books, and songs—to more closely investigate the discourses and performances of drinking culture. Drinking culture, I argue, not only had a significant role in shaping the Restoration's civic culture of political participation and the emerging early modern public sphere, but also positioned emotions of pleasure and melancholy as social and political objects of care and cultivation. While the politics of pub culture and intoxication have been well documented by historians and literary scholars of early modern England and eighteenth-century America, much of this discussion has not yet been incorporated into political assessments of the public sphere and its history. Reinserting emotion and intoxication into the emergence of the public sphere helps to flesh out the history of feeling and social ritual in civic engagement.

The Communists in Italy, France and Spain have banished the phrase “the dictatorship of the proletariat” from their vocabulary. That does not mean that they have abandoned socialism as an intermediate objective of their policy. They continue to fight for socialism; however, they no longer wish to establish it on the classical pattern through the dictatorship of the “proletariat” but rather through an “advanced form of democracy” in which the institutions and procedures of representative democracy, such as parliament and regular general elections and civil rights and freedoms, are respected and even guaranteed.

There is enormous and unabated interest in Smith's thought partly because he remains—rightly or wrongly—the most important touchstone for the liberal, free-market project. But it is also because his work is so rich and therefore capable of bearing multiple interpretations. In fact, Smith studies is a surprisingly large and competitive field, with its own journal: in 2003 the quantity of secondary literature on Smith could be realistically described as “enough to sink a small boat” (Margaret Schabas, “Adam Smith's Debts to Nature,” in Oeconomies in the Age of Newton, ed. De Marchi and Schabas [Duke University Press, 2003], 1) and today it is even larger. Here are three new books to add to that growing literature; all are important additions.

This article critically examines the widely accepted thesis that because of basic theoretical differences between Hamilton and Madison the Federalist is best read as the product of a “split personality.” An examination of the areas and concerns identified by leading proponents of this thesis (Douglass Adair and Alpheus T. Mason) fails to reveal any significant differences between Hamilton and Madison writing as “Publius.” In fact, this analysis reveals a very close correspondence in their views on the basic principles of the proposed system. These findings strongly support the proposition that the Federalist is a consensual work whose contradictions and tensions reflect more basic difficulties endemic to the proposed system and principles of republicanism rather than theoretical differences between its authors.

This is a political world of power and competition for power, together with, hopefully, the legitimate authority that goes with such power; a world where ability to dominate the will of others is prized either in itself or for other ends. Politics is associated with the quest for power, as an end or means. It is not surprising, therefore, that in looking at those thinkers in the past who have focused on human relationships and organized associations, commentators should be facinated with how they looked at domination, and also, secondarily, how they viewed freedom from such domination (for example, the limits of power). In the measure that these thinkers dealt with politics, one might say, they concerned themselves with power, authority, leadership, and, coincidentally, with freedom. put another way, what is typically “political” about their views about the “political system”; that is, how they looked at the process whereby valued goods are allocated authoritatively. This “system” includes formal, publlic institutional arrangements, such as the “State”, and processes within these institutions, such as “conflict” and“conciliation”.

One of the challenges which democracies face is to preserve the essential liberties of their citizenry while undergoing continual, even drastic, economic and technological development. Mario Einaudi has described the New Deal as an effort to translate eighteenth-century agrarian democracy into twentiethcentury industrial democracy without evacuating the unique values which the Founding Fathers wished to be transmitted. Since the days of FDR, the United States of America has created a distinct “social breakthrough” by being the first nation to enter the postindustrial age of nuclear energy, computers, television, rockets, missiles, wonder drugs, psychedelic techniques, fertility control techniques, and supersonic jet travel. That political processes cannot be divorced from the wider environmental matrix of sociotechnological innovations is a proposition which is gaining in acceptance. Acknowledging the incidence of technological invention on the political process, we have singled out for case study the history of the communications satellite technology, the creation of an unprecedented “chosen instrument” to establish a global system of communications satellites, and the subsequent formation of an international consortium whose members have codominion over the space segment of the global system. What interests us in this study is how technological leadership becomes converted into other forms of power such as economic, political, and commercial.

In Some Thoughts Concerning Education, John Locke intends that gentlemen educated according to his standards quietly dethrone the aristocrats as the model for society. Locke hopes to direct most gentlemen away from a desire to imitate aristocratic manners and toward practical economic goals consistent with the needs of all. The excellent example of the new gentlemen will combine with their good treatment of the lower classes to entice the latter to imitate them. Locke thus hopes to reconcile gentlemen and the common man. Crucial components of this education include a tough physical regimen, the humane treatment of servants, and the re-education of fathers. Locke's educational program supports his political goals in the Second Treatise and is somewhat adaptable to our own democratic age.

Since Pearl Harbor, American foreign policy during the Harding-Coolidge-Hoover years has receivedalargely negative appraisal from historians. In the aftermath of World War II, the adherents of Wilsonian internationalism dominated the writing of American diplomatic history. The crux of their indictment of the Republican administrations of the twenties was that this country's refusal to participate in collective-security arrangements for upholding the peace was responsible for the breakdown of international order in the years that followed. If the United States had joined the League of Nations, or at the minimum cooperated with the peace-loving nations, Britain, France, and, until the illusions of the wartime alliance collapsed, the Soviet Union, against would-be or actual aggressors, the Second World War could have been avoided. Although this view has continued to have its champions, the hardening of Cold War tensions —and the accompanying disillusionment with the efficacy of the United Nations — spurred a major counterattack upon what George F. Kennan has termed the “legalistic-moralistic approach to international problems.” With the emergence of the so-called realist school came a different—though no more positive—evaluation of the role played by the United States during the age of normalcy.

The article argues that feminist theory needs a concept of objectivity as part of its working epistemology. “Objectivity” is not, as has been argued by some contemporary feminists, inevitably a “dichotomist male epistemological construct,” leading to psychological distance and the hierarchies of “knower” and “known” that have victimized many groups in liberal society. The article analyzes Catherine MacKinnon's critique of “objectivity” as one of the most explicit, sophisticated and compelling theories demonstrating current feminist mistrust of “objectivity.” It finds that even MacKinnon uses “objectivity” in a one-dimensional manner, equating epistemological objectivity with political objectification.

This essay questions the seemingly laudatory judgment of Cesare Borgia in The Prince, chapter 7, by highlighting its emphasis on Borgia's dependence on the arms of others, which Machiavelli equates with “fortune.” During their encounters in 1502–1503, Machiavelli became keenly aware of Borgia's dependence on his papal father, on France, and on mercenaries. The praise of the “foundations” Borgia allegedly laid to remedy this dependence (including a fantasized conquest of Tuscany) is not Machiavelli's own assessment but the voice of Borgia's self-dramatizing and self-deceiving exaggerations. Knowing the weakness behind Cesare's bravado, Machiavelli could not have considered him the model of the “new prince,” still less of the “redeemer” invoked in chapter 26. On the contrary, Borgia is the negative model of the new prince who depends on the arms of others, inevitably fails, and blames fortune misconstrued as malicious fate.