In any Discussion of American community life two beliefs are likely to quickly come to the fore. First, that we have over the last 50 years undergone a revolution in community settlement patterns and today we are an urban nation with more and more of our population crowding into our urban areas. Many now speak with disdain about the runaway urbanization and the emerging “ant-hill society.” A second theme that almost always accompanies the first is that the quality of life in our urban communities is deteriorating rapidly. One can hardly read a daily metropolitan newspaper without spotting a headline which sounds the alarm. Not long ago, for example, the New York Times had a front-page spread with the startling headline, “Eleven Mayors Warn Here of Collapse of U.S. Cities.” Stewart Alsop, in a Newsweek column with the foreboding title “The Cities Are Finished,” managed in the course of one page to inform his readers that the cities may be “finished” because they have become unlivable; that the net population of cities will continue to fall; that the future is statistically predictable—in another 10 years most of our cities will consist mostly of blacks; and that the cities will come to resemble reservations for the poor and the blacks surrounded by heavily guarded middle-class suburbs. More recently, Sol Linowitz, Chairman of the National Urban Coalition, declared, “We have abandoned our cities … [and while they] are not on fire today, most of the conditions that caused the civil disorders in recent years have worsened.”

The challenge of fascism led Italy's most distinguished philosopher, Benedetto Croce, to focus on the condition of the philosophical foundations of liberalism. Partly as a result, Croce became a central figure in the liberal opposition to fascism, and when, in the early 1940's, it became possible to envision the reconstruction of a liberal political order in Italy, he had no choice but to play a major role, even though he was seventy-seven years old in 1943. Largely because of Croce's direct involvement, the ensuing debate over political priorities brought to the surface, to an unusual degree, major questions about the intellectual underpinnings of liberalism. Croce had been seeking to bring liberal theory up to date, with some promising results, but his immediate practical preoccupations during the 1940's diluted the force of his argument, so the contribution which he could have made to a modern recasting of liberalism, both for Italy and for modern culture in general, was not appreciated. Instead, Croce's stance contributed to tensions that quickly caused Italian liberalism to fragment — and to shrink — and of course the resulting weakness has been crucial to postwar Italian history. On the European level as well, the new liberalism he had in mind never fully coalesced, and thus in part, liberalism has been widely considered passé among European intellectuals.

When discussing the preconditions of liberal Islamic politics, liberal theorists often advocate the reinterpretation of traditional religious texts in light of liberal political theory. Such an interpretive project is worth comparing to a similar project conceived by the medieval Islamic philosopher Alfarabi, whose effort to introduce Greek political philosophy into his political-religious community parallels these efforts to introduce liberal theory into Islamic communities. Alfarabi argued that traditional texts should be reinterpreted in light of a new political science, one based on Greek sources but adapted to the unique needs of a community like his. This article shows how Alfarabi conceived of these adaptations, emphasizing the flexibility that he thought students of Greek political philosophy should adopt in accommodating even Islamic doctrines that they could not fully accept.

It is a strange quirk of intellectual history that essays in the comprehensive interpretation of history seem to have become fashionable in inverse proportion to the decline of system-building in philosophy. Given this tendency, however, it is not surprising that philosophical historians have again focussed their attention upon America and that new systematic interpretations of American development have come to light. One such interpretation returns to the theories of one of the most praised but most neglected students of American society: Alexis de Tocqueville. According to this view the crucial fact in American history is the absence of a European ancien régime. The leading exponent of the “back to de Tocqueville” movement adverts to what might be called “the storybook truth about American history: that America was settled by men who fled from the feudal and clerical oppressions of the Old World.” If this view is correct, “then the outstanding thing about the American community in Western history ought to be the nonexistence of those oppressions, or since the reaction against them was in the broadest sense liberal, that the American community is a liberal community.” But in this sense of the term, “liberal” America was not the only “liberal” community, for America was not the only country which created a frontier existence free of many of the restraints of the old European society. Australia developed a comparable frontier life, and it had no entrenched aristocracy of the European sort.

The workings of many factors have wrought political change the world over. Among these, the impact of scientific-technological development upon society has been the most powerful agent of political transformation. Obvious as this has been fora long time, the progress of science and technology continues to outpace political creativity by a broad margin. Increasingly, political institutions are being left to accommodate themselves to the accomplished fact of scientific-technological progress— or to lose their functional significance. The logic of the political which alone can devise and master the social order, has become subservient to the logic of the apolitical. It is as if our society insists upon giving to Karl Marx's crude hypothesis what our economic experience withheld; we are about to validate Marxist determinism by the failure of our political imagination rather than the failure of our economic system. It seems as if the contrivances of science and technology now tell us not only what we should do with them but also how to order our lives. If this appearance is not deceptive — and it is proposed here to show that it is not — political change will befall our society like a natural event beyond man's control. To foreclose a disastrous deterioration of the political order and hence the human condition, it will be necessary to develop an appropriate philosophy of political change and, in the light of such a philosophy, policies which govern the integration of scientific and technological progress — the making of our “tools” — into political development. Part of what follow will be devoted to showing why the political needs to remain primary in order to insure that political change will be beneficial change. At the threshold of political change must stand political will.

Modern politics is often said to be fundamentally secular, and many who do not say so may find the proposition too obvious to need stating. In a sense, perhaps, it is obvious; but what does it mean? No doubt it is valuable to have a term to describe a society without religion, or one in which common affairs are not religiously directed. But it is odd to suppose that the sheer absence of a characteristic can serve effectively to define a type of society; for one thing, we would need to know what kind of religion was absent, or in what respects religion was lacking, before we could assess what significance this absence could be said to have; for another, to define a society by the absence of a certain feature would seem to point to an intense preoccupation with its presence or absence, yet it is precisely the lack of preoccupation with religion that is held to characterize secular man. A fortiori, it is odd to suppose that secularity not only serves to distinguish broadly among kinds of societies—those with and without religion—but that it also determines the principal features of social and political behavior, to such an extent that one can speak of a secular political culture as a distinct and well-marked type.

Current literature on recent Soviet industrial and agricultural reorganizations emphasizes the economic rather than the political significance of the reforms. Because economists have written on these developments more than political scientists, the importance of politics and the political meaning of these changes have not been adequately recognized. This article does not purport to minimize the economic significance of these reforms; it will examine some of the political factors which hitherto have been overlooked or de-emphasized.

If burma has needed to prove its right to be considered genuinely neutral in world affairs, it clearly did so in the first weeks of November 1956. At a time when it was engaged in crucial negotiations with Red China over Chinese incursions into its border territories, Burma chose to go on record in the United Nations and in the councils of the uncommitted Asian nations strongly condemning Russian aggression in Hungary along with the British, French and Israeli aggression in Egypt. Despite this, Burma to date has managed to hold its own in the Chinese negotiations.

This article examines Hegel's philosophy of history with the intention of once again rendering it strange. Hegel's “historicism” has been accepted for so long that the actual terms of his history are rarely examined afresh. But his account of the past, it is argued here, is best understood through the vocabulary of art and beauty that he develops in the Aesthetics. Historical forms cannot be wholly grasped through the vocabulary of dialectical reason, but ought to be seen as “shapes” in a strong sense. Two principle conclusions follow from this reassessment: The first is that the Philosophy of History is best understood neither as an optimistic account of rational progress, nor as a tale of the “end of history” in liberal democracy, but as an attempt to “seduce us to life”—that is, an attempt to reconcile us to the world through the beauty of history. The second conclusion is that this attempt must fail. It fails because, in his effort to discern beauty in the past, Hegel imposes a completeness upon time that excludes the possibility of a future. Whether intentionally or not, Hegel's pessimism about art is transmitted to his philosophy of history. The Temple of Memory that Hegel builds to shelter our souls ends up imprisoning them instead.

It was in 1948 that Pierre Cot called for French neutrality in the rapidly developing tension between the communist and non-communist power blocs. But after all Cot, an influential prewar figure of the Radical Party's left wing and Air Minister of the Popular Front Government, had emerged from the war as a staunch communist sympathizer and a leader of the pro-communist Union Progressiste. Consequently, his opposition to the policy of a West European defense coalition — the Brussels Pact — hardly seemed surprising. Outside the sphere of direct communist influence, however, few important voices in France opposed the formation of a West European defense system.

From 1950 to 1954 American politics were dominated as never before by one man, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, and by the phenomenon of “McCarthyism.” Yet many of the questions raised by those years of turmoil and controversy remain unanswered. What was the source and nature of the power that McCarthy wielded over the United States Senate? Why did the members of that body acquiesce, for nearly five years, in his continued abuse of the democratic process? Beyond this, were the McCarthy years aberrational? Did they represent some malfunction in our political machinery? Or were they the natural and inevitable by-product of that system itself?

Among influential writers in the field of political development and comparative politics in the last two decades few have excelled Samuel P. Huntington. With a prudent economy of basic concepts, Huntington has addressed a variety of political problems in many different kinds of societies. His work has been germane to the issues of power and morality, revolution, stability, violence, corruption, participation, and, above all, the political implications of social change. In a challenging and encyclopedic manner, Huntington has managed to relate his ideas to the experiences of Africa, Asia, Latin America, Europe, and the United States, enriching the conceptual insights of diverse area specialists and providing interesting theoretical linkages for seemingly very different and singular social and political worlds. Acknowledging all this, one nevertheless may (and this writer would say “must”) question the basic premise of Huntington's understanding of politics: both theoretically and practically.

In Marx's writings there is a notion of “nature” as applied to man, which is not the notion ordinarily imputed to Marx. This notion is a more fundamental one and offers the possibility of a fresh analysis of certain aspects of Marx's theory on man and society. Up to now it has not been exploited by Marx's American commentators.

Changes in voting behavior and the party system in the three federal elections since 1980 indicate that West German politics have entered a new transitional phase. The periods of CDU hegemony, 1949–1969, and two party competition, 1972–1980, have passed. Both major parties have lost support, turnout has declined, ticket-splitting has increased and New Politics issues such as the environment, disarmament and civil liberties have become salient to increasing numbers of voters. The influence of social class, religion and regional ties on voting behavior has declined. Electoral behavior has become more volatile and uncertain. Four major sources of these changes are identified: the postwar transformation of German social structure; the changing value priorities of mass publics; the introduction of new issues; and the electoral strategies of the parties as determined by their elites and leaders. The study concludes with a discussion of the future of the party system and the prospects for a major dealignment or realignment in West German politics.

My subject is the World Bank and the Third World. The Bank has taken on the overwhelming task of helping the development of the countries we call, for want of a better word, “underdeveloped,” less favored or, to use a kindlier expression, “developing.” In short, the poor countries. My talk will be divided into three chapters. The first will deal with the origins of foreign aid, the second with the present situation and the last with what we should do to improve our procedures, enlarge our sources of income and perfect their use in the developing world.

THE tendency among interpreters of Rousseau's political ideas has been to give, at most, cursory attention to the role played by religion in his thought. Although it is impossible to overlook the long penultimate chapter on civil religion in the Social Contract, analysts have generally viewed it as, at best, a Machiavelli-like attempt to provide emotional “cement” for the state or, at worst, as a lamentable and eccentric departure from Rousseau's main emphasis on the realization of freedom through democracy.

The article defends the proposition that the distinctive diplomatic legacy of John Quincy Adams constitutes an important case study documenting the significance of moral reasoning in the statesman's obligation to uphold the national interest in a universal system of power politics. Recourse to political ethics afforded Adams a vantage point from which to evaluate the volatile problem of intervention—viewed in terms of the moral responsibilities and limits of American power—at a crucial turning point in the diplomatic history of the young republic. Important in this connection is how Adams attempted to reconcile the blessings of liberty with the methods and purposes of American diplomacy within and beyond the Western Hemisphere.An attempt is made to evaluate the sources and meaning of statesmanship for Adams who—as perhaps the nation's most experienced diplomat and accomplished Secretary of State—judged the limits and opportunities of American power from a perspective that considered moral precepts and international law as compatible with the prudent pursuit of American national interest in world affairs.