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.

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.

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.

We Shall describe first the attitude of the hierarchy towards the Vichy regime just after the armistice, secondly the political and religious resistance of a certain number of lay Catholics to this regime, and finally how this will to temporal independence by Catholic citizens (with the exception of some Catholic leaders who did not grasp the significance of the Pétain government) resulted in a general opposition to the totalitarian pretensions of the “French State.”

The establishment of the Oder-Neisse line as a “provisional” frontier between Germany and Poland and the “elimination of national minorities” connected therewith are part of a settlement which not only affects basically the fate of Germany and Poland but also has some very broad implications. These implications deserve public discussion from various angles.

This paper constructs, within the American liberal consensus, a conceptual frame into which the great paradoxes of American politics can be fitted without significant omission or unexplained contradiction. The foundation of the American liberal consensus is seen to be a Protestant-bourgeois individualism divided against itself. This fundamental division issues into conflicting visions of America as a democracy. In national, legitimizing myth, America is seen as a Protestant-tinctured social democracy organized in terms of sovereignty of the people, confederalism, separation of powers, and popular government. On the other hand, in the ideology of America as a legally functioning state, it is a bourgeois, liberal democracy organized in terms of constitutionalism, federalism, mixed government, and representative government. These distinctions make possible a consistent explanation of the consensus-cleavage paradox that lies at the core of American political life. They also explain the persistent ambiguity that confuses the democratic character of the American political system and also the biformalism of its major institutions.

Following the tradition of social contract theories of the early modern age, John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice, renewed the notion of the “original position,” that is, a set of behavioral assumptions from which general principles of justice are deduced. José Saramago's novel Blindness enriches Rawls's normative theory by adding behavioral assumptions that help clarify some of the problems raised by the theory's critics and enhance its application to social and political settings.

The Book of Jonah depicts the tension between justice and mercy. Jonah's peculiar community, the “chosen” people, does not merely provide security and prosperity, but aims to shape the souls of its own members, and, eventually, of all human beings. The parable is optimistic about the possibility of justice in a world of distinct peoples. But on an individual level it is tragic, because Jonah himself fails to reach a practicable view of justice for imperfect but educable fellows and foreigners. He himself remains a distorted human being, deficient especially in his use of language, neither beast nor god, but, in the end, outside any community. As a reading on the highest holiday of the Jewish year, the story has a special place among Jonah's people. Neither homily nor sermon, it is an example of public storytelling as an instrument of education.

The article explores a cross-cultural approach to the history of political thought. With reference to Maruyama Masao's classic equation of fourteenth-century European scholasticism with eighteenth-century Japanese Confucianism, a comparison between Marsilius of Padua and Ogyu Sorai reveals, behind their ostensibly similar “communal functionalist” outlook, their contrasting views on the role of language as a medium for political communication. Marsilius believed in human's associative power by means of such linguistic communication as oratory and discussion, whereas Sorai underrated speech to favor government by ritual. This contrast has repercussions for the two traditions of political thought in Western Europe and Japan. The exalted status of speech in political communication constituted a mainstream of late medieval and early modern political discourse in Western Europe, whereas the Japanese Confucian idea of government by ritual survived until the mid-nineteenth century when it clashed with European thought then being imported into Japan.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Since the English conquest, the Quebec Roman Catholic Church has been the most important single agency for the defense and perpetuation of the French-Canadian heritage in North America. Although its commanding position is unchallenged, the Church has long shared its authority with elites in the political and economical spheres. These other elites, however, have by no means competed with the Church. Indeed, interchange and cooperation among elites have been characteristic of French-Canadian society. Viewed as essential to cultural survival, this close unity among elites has encouraged the retention of an ordered, hierarchical social structure with many pre-industrial features.