Near the start of her fascinating new book The Lost History of Liberalism, Helena Rosenblatt dryly observes that “available histories of liberalism are seldom helpful” (2). The point is well taken: the historiography of liberalism—largely written as intellectual history—is not particularly coherent, and has only sporadically adopted sound historical methodology. The genre emerged relatively late. The proliferation of the language of liberalism in the nineteenth century, not least in party politics, did not produce theoretically informed historical accounts of particular note. A historiography of liberalism really only developed in response to the perceived “crisis of liberalism” of the early twentieth century. Guido de Ruggiero's 1925 The History of European Liberalism was written in a Hegelian idealist tradition, according to which liberalism was an “organic development of freedom coinciding with the organization of human society and its progressively higher and more spiritual forms.” Coming from a different direction was Harold Laski's The Rise of European Liberalism: An Essay in Interpretation, published in 1936. Laski's liberalism was as much a “habit of mind” as a set of doctrines, with a complex history making both “clarity difficult” and “precision unattainable.” An essentialized understanding of liberalism was nevertheless still at work. Laski's liberalism was that the individualist, utilitarian mode of thought necessary to an emerging capitalist society. “The liberal creed, in a word,” he wrote, “is a doctrine woven from the texture of bourgeois need.”

Hegel's philosophy of history is conventionally regarded as a part of his mature “system of science.” And so it is. What is less frequently understood, however, is that this philosophy grew out of or can at least be understood as an attempt to come to terms with a crisis in the tradition of modern natural right.

The conferences, the spectaculars of European diplomacy between the First and Second World Wars, have contributed some interesting myths to the folk history of the twentieth century. The Munich Conference of 1938, for example, has come to represent to some an act of betrayal, surrender and defeat—an effort to have one's own skin by selling out a small country in a vainattempt to satisfy a dictator's unlimited appetite. The Locarno Conference of October, 1925, has been regarded as an event which brought an end to the conflict between Germany and the Western powers during the World War and its aftermath. Supposedly, at Locarno enemies were reconciled after years of hostility, and a new era dawned: the following four years were a period of harmony between Germany and the West, as foreign ministers from each side conducted personal diplomacy in an atmosphere of good will. These assertions about Locarno have received less scholarly attention than the myth of Munich and deserve critical reexamination. As part of that reconsideration, some measurement might be taken of the level of misunderstanding and malevolence and hope — either genuine or illusory.

The 1930's posed difficult moral problems for European Catholics. First came Mussolini's questionable adventure in belated colonialism in Ethiopia. Then the war in Spain suddenly, and with piercing sharpness, posed the moral problems of civil war. For the most influential Catholic thinker of his time, Jacques Maritain, the war in Spain was a challenging difficulty. Though Maritain openly refused his allegiance to Franco, and thereby became a scandal to Catholics horrified by the Spanish republic's attacks on the official Church, his reflections on Spain gave impetus to a current of thought in Catholic circles that culminated in the declaration of the Second Vatican Council on the relations between church and state. Hence, as so often happens, a time of confusion and fraternal strife was also a time of clarification, and a time of despair broadened into a time of hope.

It is paradoxical that an author whose thought is widely recognized to have had a profound influence on such revolutionary thinkers as Locke, Bayle, and Rousseau should be regarded as having himself been an extreme conservative in questions of political practice. Yet such is the almost unanimous judgment of contemporary scholars on Michel de Montaigne. While Montaigne endeavored in the Essays to question radically the grounds of all accepted beliefs and practices, and specifically denounced the unreasonableness and unjustness of many laws and customs practiced in his time, it is believed that he nonetheless opposed all attempts at political innovation or reform, fearing that any such change would only make matters worse.

Areal cultural shift doesn't happen very often. Skepticism about whether one took place in the 1960's is quite natural, especially in view of the rapidity with which cultural fashions have come and gone in the past 15 years. The New Conservatism had hardly crested before it was succeeded by the End of Ideology, which was displaced with equal speed by the New Left. In the religious sphere, the revival of the early 50's gave way to the Death of God 10 years later. This proved even more ephemeral. With its companion, the Secular City, it was left behind in a welter of new movements—occultism, mysticism, and various forms of millenarian religious revolutionism. Paradoxically, the dizzying pace of change itself seemed to argue that nothing very profound was going on.

InTheFolklore of our national past the Federalist Period is often thought of as a golden age of demigods, who were almost infallible. The noisy dissent from the program of the Federalist administrations has been regarded as only a temporary deviation from the true American tradition.

The most frequently read accounts of the period — especially in college textbooks and other short works of synthesis — have generally tended to reduce the political events of that age to a chapter in the history of the “Age of Reason” and have thereby done some damage to our understanding. Casual readers of the story of this age seem to finish their reading with a mental summary in which the emphasis is on the intellect and logic — in short, on reason. An excellent example of this image as it occurs in the lore of even the learned is a recent comment on Senator J. William Fulbright by Senator Paul Douglas: “He's a child of the eighteenth century, a throwback to that age of enlightenment, trust in reason, temperate argument, and slightly aristocratic tendencies. That, I think, explains why he seems a little aloof, a little different from the rest.”

The history of the secularization of modern culture has yet to be written, and the reasons for this are easy enough to understand. For on the one hand, the mind of the secularized majority has been so deeply affected by the process of secularization that it cannot view that process in an objective historical manner, while on the other, the religious minority has been forced into an attitude of negative opposition which is no less unfavorable to dispassionate study. Nevertheless, it is emphatically a problem which requires an historical approach. The process of secularization was a historical movement no less than the Reformation, a minority movement which was gradually transmitted to wider circles until it eventually won the key positions of social and intellectual influence through which it dominated European society. This movement, which was already known as the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, and the accompanying ideology, which later acquired the name of Liberalism, have long been studied by historians chiefly in Germany and France, though in a somewhat piecemeal fashion; but their work has not hitherto been fully assimilated by educated opinion in England and America. Here the tendency has been to concentrate attention on political and economic change, and above all on the American and French revolutions. But we have not paid enough attention to the intellectual revolution that had already taken place before there was any question of a political one. Yet it is this intellectual revolution that is responsible for the secularization of Western culture. This intellectual movement, like most of the movements that have changed the world, was religious in origin, although it was anti-religious in its results. It owed its dynamism to the resistance of a religious minority and its diffusion to the illjudged and unjust, though sincere, action of religious orthodoxy. It is indeed, the supreme example in history of the way in which religious persecution and repression defeats its own object and serves the cause it is attempting to destroy.

The conventional wisdom on the basic philosophy of the constitutional concept of the separation of powers is well stated in The Federalist. In No. 47, citing the authority of the “celebrated Montesquieu,” James Madison wrote that “the accumulation of all powers legislative, executive and judiciary in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” Clearly the Founding Fathers feared the corrupting influence of power. As Madison asked in No. 51, “what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” Another concise statement of the separation of powers concept is found in the famous remark made by Justice Brandeis in 1926, in his dissenting opinion in the Myers case, that “the doctrine of the separation of powers was adopted by the Convention of 1787 not to promote efficiency but to preclude the exercise of arbitrary power. The purpose was not to avoid friction, but, by means of the inevitable friction incident to the distribution of governmental powers among three departments, to save the people from autocracy.”

The article considers Machiavelli's terza rima poems on Ingratitude, Ambition, Fortune and Occasion, generally called I Capitoli, in the context of Renaissance hermeticism, cabbala, erotic magic, and astrology. It argues that these poems, taken together and read as a whole, reveal Machiavelli's playful yet subversive cosmology that ousts the old gods by instituting a new theogony. At the same time, I Capitoli, addressed and dedicated to his friends, discloses Machiavelli's own ambitions and desires, delineating the subtle link between Niccolò the poet and Niccolò the prophet and benefactor.

Karl Marx and the United States is a subject which immediately elicits interest, but also surprise. Interest, because of its contemporary importance; surprise, because Marx and America have appeared so remote from one another. Marx has definitely influenced America, but that will not be the theme of this essay —instead, we will concern ourselves with the role of America in the thought of Marx. The magnitude of this role is illustrated by a statement made in Marx's letter to Abraham Lincoln, written in 1864 on behalf of the International Workingmen's Association:

The workingmen of Europe feel sure that as the American war of independence initiated a new era of the ascendency of the middle-class, so the American Anti-slavery war will do for the working-class.

Simone Weil's work has always been appreciated for its evocative beauty, but not always for its potential contributions to political thought. In this essay, we engage in a reappraisal of her political thought, and of her relevance to contemporary politics, by way of her discussion of the power of words. Weil shares much with contemporary approaches that view the world as a text to be interpreted. But for Weil, the power of interpretation carries with it an illusion, exemplified in Weil's example of Achilles watching over his war-work, in which the world can be seen, measured, and shaped according to one's will. For Weil, the illusion of control that accompanies this perspective is undermined by our encounter with a world of physical causes and sensations that impact us, quite without us being able to control them.

The protagonist of Aristophanes's Birds rises from nowhere to become a tyrannos of the first order, but scholars disagree when assessing him. Do Peisetairos's impressive political gifts make him an apt example of competent rule, or does his treatment of his subjects mark him as guilty of hubris and perfidy? While documenting the distinguishing features of this remarkable ruler, it is argued that—Arrowsmith's eloquent essay notwithstanding—Aristophanes does not condemn him. Nor, however, does he recommend Peisetairos's rule, as Henderson suggests. Between these extremes is a more complex via media: if a birdlike populace is to have an empire, they must also embrace a Peisetairos. But it would not be unwise to oppose an empire at such a price, even if the Alcibidean leader who would preside over it cannot be condemned for seeking to rule in the way he imagines to be most advantageous for himself.

InTheLight of recent decisions of the United States Supreme Court, it might appear that the judiciary is currently the most radical branch of the Federal Government. In certain respects circumstances today, present a scene similar to that of 1937. The Court, now as then, is denounced as an unelected, undemocratic group which, under the pretense of interpreting the laws and Constitution, makes a law contrary to the will of the majority of the American people. Only today it is the right that denounces the Court and the left that comes to its defense.