Exchanges of this sort typically consist of each side claiming the other has misunderstood its own position. Keeping to this tradition, I will begin by arguing that Professor Dahl has misconstrued my critique of his proof. But toward the end I will do something different and suggest another argument advocates of workplace democracy could pursue that avoids the pitfalls of the parallel case.

In his reply Professor Dahl ascribes to me a libertarian position which I explicitly reject. He says that I view consent to authoritarian rule at work as a freely made choice involving absolutely no coercion. But, Professor Dahl counters, this assumption is obviously false for most workers in our economy, who find themselves in a weak bargaining position for want of capital or valuable skills. They are not in a position to negotiate political equality at work, and so we cannot interpret their submission to employers as a valid act of consent. In my terminology, their subjection option is hollow and thus irrelevant to the parallel case upon which the proof rests. As Professor Dahl sees it, I am a kind of uncompassionate conservative, enjoying a privileged occupational life but unconcerned about the plight of those less fortunate than myself.

But Professor Dahl can only arrive at this conclusion by ignoring the fourth section of my paper, on the exploitation objection. There I go even farther than he does in granting the hollowness of the subjection option.

A Dolf Hitler passed the long, summer days of his 1924 incarceration in the Landsberg fortress reliving his past. Each day he retired to a large and sunny room to dictate the story of his “Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity, and Cowardice” to his admirers, Emil Maurice and Rudolf Hess. As he paced the room, Hitler subjected his memories of childhood in upper-Austria, youth in Vienna and Munich, young manhood at the Western front, and political awakening in postwar Munich to the scrutiny of his accumulated political wisdom at thirty-five. He vindicated his ideas by an examination of his life revealing how personal experiences led him to knowledge and truth in page after page of poor prose.

While Roman Catholic commentary on specific phases of American life and politics fills many volumes, particularly in the form of periodical literature, systematic analyses of American government in terms of the philosophy of-the Church Fathers and the great scholastics are rarely encountered. Certainly, such an examination addressed to the general reading public is exceptional. Even more unusual is it to find a work from this viewpoint accepted as an influential element in our intellectual development and heritage. Such, however, has been the happy fate of Orestes A. Brownson's The American Republic, which has found its way even into text book discussions of American political ideas. Yet, while the reasons for its notice are, in historical retrospect, understandable, the resultant analysis has done the work somewhat less than justice. It has been treated almost exclusively as part of the literature which marked the triumph of Republicanism and nationalism against the Confederacy and the states' rights doctrine. Now, while Brownson, who entered his spiritual and intellectual resting place after finding Presbyterianism, Universalism, and Unitarianism successively inadequate to his needs, undoubtedly desired to justify the triumphant federal union against its opponents, his fundamental objective, in which he revealed the ardor not unusual in converts, was to show the nature of American political institutions in the light of the tradition of Roman Catholic moral and political philosophy. Indeed, while he deplored the extreme states' rights idea as manifested in Secession, he was even more concerned with the problem of excessive centralization, which he saw as the great potential danger for the future.

This is a friendly critique of the Liberation Theology being elaborated in Latin America. The preferential option for the poor constricts its attention to economic disadvantage, and ascribes virtually all impoverishment to purposeful oppression. The poor are, simply in virtue of their deprivation, said to be so morally exalted that the gospel has for them no call to conversion. Theirs is a salvation without further ado. Yet their salvation turns out to be predominantly, if not exclusively, economic and political. A predilection for the Exodus displaces the death and resurrection ofJesus as the dominant paradigm for liberation. It is maladapted to a Christian vision of liberation, which must aim at communion with the enemy, not mere triumph. By claiming justice as its goal and fulfillment, liberation theology seems to suffer from a loss of Christian nerve. Looking to the socialist state as the sure guarantor of justice, it seems politically naive, and barren of the Christian hope that both exploiter and victim must be transformed into more than just persons (because prepared to return good for evil) well before the society around them has become a fit home even for justice.

The subject I am discussing here deals with a very peculiar kind of knowledge — a kind of knowledge whose means is not concepts and reasoning, but affective inclination or affinity, and which is often disregarded by philosophers interested only in the rational kind of knowing. Henri Bergson liked to quote a sentence he found in the letters of a French philosopher; the sentence was as follows: “I have suffered from this friend enough to know him.” When I know a friend to the core — not through having submitted him to a complete series of psychological tests, but because I have suffered from him and have got in myself the habit of his nature — then we may say in philosophical language that I know this man by connaturality.

The five weeks' government of Prince Max von Baden (Oct.3–Nov. 9, 1918) is of crucial importance in German history, for it signalizes the end of the First World War and Germany's formal achievement of the parliamentary system. A great deal of material was published about it shortly afterwards, usually with a highly polemical purpose. Thus the Amtliche Urkunden zur Vorgeschichte des Waffenstillstandes 1918 published by the Foreign Ministry and the Ministry of the Interior in 1919 (2nd edition, Berlin, 1924), was motivated by the desire to pin responsibility for Germany's armistice request upon the Supreme Command. It succeeded in dispelling the Stab-in-the-Back Legend as far as educated people were concerned, but these proved only an uninfluential minority during the Weimar Republic. The comprehensive Erinnerungen of Prince Max (Berlin, 1927), written with a large staff of collaborators, provided an exceptionally full account of the period, though one necessarily apologetic in tone and reticent about Max's own weaknesses. The case of the Conservative opposition was ably argued by Count Kuno Westarp, the Conservative leader, in his Die Regierung des Prinzen Max von Baden und die Konservative Partei 1918 (Berlin, 1928). These important works all included the publication of primary documents, though they were necessarily selected in an ex parte manner.

Professor Paul Lucas has described Edmund Burke's theory of prescription as his “idea about the way in which an adverse possession of property and authority may be legitimated by virtue of use and enjoyment during a long passage of time.” The description is accurate so far as it goes. Burke certainly maintained that if one had held uncontested possession as the owner of a piece of property for a sufficiently long period of time, no earlier title to the property, however valid, could be revived and made to prevail against the occupant's title. Through the passage of time the occupant had acquired a title by prescription, and this in Burke's eyes was “the soundest, the most general, and the most recognized title … a title, which … is rooted in its principle, in the law of nature itself, and is indeed the original ground of all known property.” Burke also said: “Prescription is the most solid of all titles, not only to property, but, which is to secure that property, to Government.”

A great many curious things have befallen Marxism as an intellectual and political tradition, not the least of which was its adoption by the revolutionary forces under the leadership of Mao Tse-tung. Originally, the Marxism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels was a eurocentric doctrine that addressed itself to a postindustrial revolution that would liberate society from the disabilities produced by intensive industrialization. For classical Marxism, industrialization produced not only the “idiocy of overproduction,” the inability to effectively distribute the abundance produced by capitalism, but generated restive populations that were “overwhelmingly proletarian.” Capitalist industrialization produced both the circumstances precipitating, and the historic agents responsible for, vast social, economic and political change.

This article offers an interpretation of British philosopher William Godwin's theory of property ownership, as outlined in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. Godwin's work can be read as presenting an incoherent account of property rights, which, on the one hand, justifies its existence on seemingly utilitarian grounds while, on the other, impugns its legitimacy on egalitarian grounds. But the contradiction apparent in Godwin's position is actually illusory and can in fact be plausibly interpreted as comprising a coherent two-level understanding of political morality, wherein the right to own private property is best comprehended as a “right to do wrong.”

The greatly increased interest in Orestes A. Brownson will probably restore him to his real importance in the history of Catholicism in the United States. Classifying him as a philosopher has caused him to be seriously neglected, because Catholic philosophers in the United States, since the revival of the philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas, have been very contemptuous of American philosophers. As a matter of fact, in his own day, before the Thomist revival, his ontologism bewildered even his admirers. Significantly, Brownson did not call himself a “philosopher” but a “publicist” — a very much neglected title in the United States.

For all of his well-known advocacy of “liberty”, Tocqueville might nevertheless be thought to have neglected a serious account of American liberties in Democracy in America. Yet there is a relatively systematic analysis of democratic liberties to be found in his study of the unprecedented openness which the regime of popular sovereignty provided for political parties, the press, and associations. In his comments on these components of democratic life, Tocqueville develops an evaluation of the political and psychological effects that he saw arising from them, and argues for the special priority he thought should be given to the liberty of association. His argument is among the earliest attempt to explore the actual practices, as distinguished from the theory, of modern liberty, and to examine the limits of democracy's emancipatory promise.

The end of the twentieth century witnessed a Confucian revival. Beginning in the 1980s, we had, among those who would speak in behalf of the Chinese, advocates like Tu Wei-ming who predicted a “third wave” of Confucianism that—with the gradual waning of Marx-Leninism's star—would provide a new ideological foundation to undergird the economic boom on Asia's Pacific Rim. In the West, the years preceding the fin de siècle produced a bumper crop of scholarly works on Confucian thought and—more to the general public's benefit and interest—numerous translations of the Lunyu, the collection of sayings which (according to tradition) contain all that we have of Confucius's teachings, as directly transmitted to his disciples. This essay reviews four of these translations, those by (in alphabetical order) Roger T. Ames and Henry Rosemont, Jr., E. Bruce and A. Taeko Brooks, Chichung Huang, and Pierre Ryckmans (writing under the pseudonym Simon Leys). All use “theAnalects” as their title, after the nineteenth-century missionary-scholar James Legge. The four are by no means the only recent translations of the book, although two are among the very best, but they represent something of the broad spectrum of styles and approaches to interpreting Confucius. I would like first, however, to describe my own approach to reading the Analects—not my interpretation of its contents but my understanding of how the text works on me as one of its many readers—by way of outlining a general framework for my review.

Are the Germans really behind the Nazi Government? Despite— or because of?—the steadily rising flood of books dealing with the Third Reich this question is answered in most different ways. There is no agreement concerning the relations between the German people and the National Socialist regime. But one's attitude towards the conduct of the war and the post-war problems is, to a large extent, determined by the opinion that one holds about these relations. Therefore, some remarks about the different answers which are given to the question: What are the sources of Hitler's power in Germany? may be of general interest.

This article offers a new interpretation of the Cuban intellectual José Martí's international political thought. It argues that Martí's analysis of early US imperialism and call for Spanish American unity are best understood as an immanent critique of the “unionist paradigm,” a tradition of international political thought that originated in the American independence movements. Martí recognized the impediments that racism had placed in the way of both US and Spanish American efforts to stabilize the hemisphere's republics by uniting them under regional institutions. He argued that, in his own time, Anglo-Saxon supremacism had deprived US-led Pan-Americanism of all legitimacy, causing a crisis of international political order in the Americas. In the context of this crisis, he developed a revised, antiracist unionism that, he argued, would free Spanish America's republics from imperial aggression and interstate conflicts, making the region a global model of stable and inclusive self-rule.

This paper has a twofold intention.

The first is to discuss the problem of political parties, — their justification and status, — in a society which requires political democracy as the set of political institutions appropriate for the government of men living under modern social and economic conditions. (By these modern conditions I mean such things as the economic forms of production and distribution in the industrial era; the organization of labor in relation to economic enterprise; the intensity and extensity of communication among men living in geographical separation and, consequently, the physical enlargement of the civic association; the approximation to universal education; the spread of literacy, etc.) There are two points to be noted here:

(1) That modern society is or tends toward a democracy in its physical and economic conditions, whether in a given instance its political forms are outwardly democratic, as in France, England and the United States, or anti-democratic, as in Italy, Germany and Russia.

(a) Not only does Russia publicize its claim to being democratic and make constitutional efforts in that direction which are, of course, at once vitiated by the persistence of its totalitarian regime; but even Germany and Italy give an appearance of democracy, — though they abominate the thought and word, — an appearance which is a reverse and distorted image. Thus, by the pressure of propaganda and the exercise of brutal force, the rulers of Germany and Italy try to make it appear that they have a mandate from the people for their policies.

This article offers a new understanding of political justification and American constitutionalism. Previous scholarship relies on philosophical justifications of constitutionalism which regard the American Constitution as the blueprint of the good society. Such claims fail to explain why persons should interpret a constitution that does not conform to their conception of political justice. Scholars could offer better reasons for interpreting an imperfect constitution if they placed greater emphasis on two other models of political justification. Institutional justifications of constitutionalism regard Constitutions as standard operating procedures for allocating the resources available for achieving the good society. Social justifications of constitutionalism regard constitutions as compromises among people of fundamentally different views. By combining philosophical, institutional and social perspectives, scholars might strengthen the case for constitutional obedience and provide better foundations for a theory of constitutional interpretation.

This article argues, contrary to the analyses of many scholars, that the political thought of the nineteenth-century Swiss cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt is neither frivolous nor irrelevant. More specifically, this essay combines biographical information about Burckhardt with an analysis of his major writings in order to challenge the notion that Burckhardt was simply a cultural historian and not a serious political thinker. The central teaching of Burckhardt's life is that the intellectual in mass society can best serve the community, not by direct political participation, but by working for the intellectual, aesthetic, and moral cultivation of the individual. The central teachings of his political writings are that “great men” often rule but unjustly, that successful leaders approach politics as a “work of art” and master the devices necessary to shape their subjects, that culture should not be subordinated to the state, and finally that individualism, class conflict, mass democracy, and the erosion of culture are both unfortunate and inevitable aspects of modernity.

The Supreme Court's approach to representation and redistricting has been grounded on a vision of fairness which extends only as far as the electoral process itself. Accordingly, the doctrine of one-person one-vote, as well as the Court's advocacy of remedial redistricting measures, has focused on ensuring that the electoral routes to legislative representation remained open. Recently, a new wave of challenges to this approach has arisen in legal scholarship and the lower federal courts because its focus on maintaining an open and pluralist political process overlooks the political realities of governing: gaining representation means little if one remains an impotent minority. This article assesses the merits of this new “neopluralist” challenge and the extent to which the Supreme Court and lower federal courts have already begun to incorporate some of its elements. The article concludes by pointing out that this incorporation has led to the establishment of two lines of precedent which are based on irreconcilable notions of representation.