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 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.

Recent scholarship has linked the rise of the Progressive movement in America to the creation of an “administrative state”—a form of government where legislative, executive, and judicial powers are delegated into the hands of administrative agencies which compose a “headless fourth branch of government.” This form of government was largely constructed during the New Deal period. The influential legal theorist Roscoe Pound provides the paradoxical example of a Progressive who balked at the New Deal. While many commentators have concluded that Pound's opposition to the New Deal was based on a departure from his earlier Progressive thought, his opposition was in fact based on a consistent Progressive philosophy. Pound therefore provided a vision of an alternative administrative state, which would achieve the ends of the Progressive vision but without the means of the administrative state.

It is not surprising that the United States produced a Socialist Party; it would be astonishing if one had not developed. American history is filled with radical and protest parties, ranging through every shade of the political spectrum and sharing the conviction that the major parties did not or would not represent their particular interests.

Traditionally, the epic focused on the heroic deeds of great public figures, but the Romantics remade the genre into something more personal, making the poet himself the hero of their epics. The Romantic disillusionment with politics, flowing from the failure of the French Revolution, lies behind their revaluation of heroism. The turn to nature, which the Romantics present as immediate, turns out to be mediated by their political experience. Wordsworth's The Prelude and Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage are good examples of the Romantic transformation of the epic and provide a case study in the relation of politics and literature, specifically the politics of literary form.

In October, 1936, the King of the Belgians, Leopold III, announced that the small Western European state planned to withdraw from her policy of alignment and adopt a policy which was “exclusively and completely Belgian.” Within six months, by the spring of 1937, Belgium signed an agreement with the French and British that replaced the defunct Locarno Pact and released her from the consultations and commitments involved in the Franco-Belgian Military Accords of 1920. The foreign policy of Belgium was altered to one of “independence” or neutrality and the two major powers of the West formally guaranteed her territorial integrity.

THANKS to Richard Ellmann's definitive biography of James Joyce we know quite a lot about the genesis and writing of ‘The Dead,’ the concluding story in Dubliners. Joyce wrote no other short stories after it, but in a letter (January 6, 1907) to his brother Stanislaus, from Rome, in which he first referred to ‘The Dead,’ he mentioned it as one of five stories “all of which … I could write if circumstances were favorable.” The others, which seem not to have been attempted were ‘The Last Supper,’ ‘The Street,’ ‘Vengeance,’ and ‘At Bay.’ It must have been immediately thereafter that ‘The Dead’ took precedence in his thought, for in a letter written only five days later he remarked that the news of the controversy in Dublin over The Playboy of the Western World had “put me off the story I ‘was going to write’ — to wit, The Dead.” Shortly afterwards he decided to give up his job as a bank cashier in Rome and return to Trieste, which on March 5, 1907, he did. Apparently he worked at the story intermittently in the ensuing months.

Rousseau's injection of the human element onto the austere scene of politics drawn in Du Contrat Social comes as a surprise. This element, personified by the legislator in Chapter 7 of Book II, serves two purposes. It dramatizes the political forces in Rousseau's scheme for not the most perfect, but perhaps the best attainable, regime. As the contemporary condition of civic slavery called for radical reform, that is, a regeneration, man must reassure himself that the birth of a good order is possible by delving back to the foundation of government. In doing so man might also learn something about how and why it takes place. The second reason for introducing the legislator relates to the vital threefold functions he performs as the eyes, brain and motive force of the people.

Even a cursory review of contemporary scholarship on the presidency and the federal administration reveals a resurgence of interest in the political thought of Alexander Hamilton and Woodrow Wilson. Developments in the last decade involving the apparent enlargement of the authority and prerogatives of the national executive together with the popularization of the idea of an emerging American bureaucratic state have contributed to this renewal of interest in the work of both theorists. What is especially striking is that to a considerable extent the contemporary interest in the thought of Hamilton, and to a lesser but still significant degree in the political teaching of Woodrow Wilson, is rooted in the crystallization of opinion that is critical of the alleged predominance of the executive establishment and the appearance of an “imperial” presidency on the one hand, and the systematic interference of federal administration in the affairs of the people on the other. Thus, for example, a major theme in both the popular and academic press during the period of American history bracketed by the Vietnam War and the Watergate crisis centered on the illiberalism of a powerful executive. More recently, proponents of participationist democracy, particularly the devotees of the public interest advocacy movement and the self-styled Tocquevillians of the public choice school, have urged reforms to check the concentration of power in the central government in general, and the national executive in particular. More importantly for the purposes of this essay, alongside this indictment of the national government has emerged an increasing tendency to cast Hamilton, witness the work of James McGregor Burns, and Wilson, a frequent target of criticism in the writings of that wing of the public choice school which includes Vincent Ostrom, as the theoreticians of a centralized executive-administrative order.

Christianity has influenced Western culture more than any factor save human nature itself, and yet its influence is now greatly diminished. Reactions to this have usually taken the form of a Hegelian affirmation that Christianity, having served its historical purpose, is no longer important in itself; a nostalgic conservatism which rejects the culture of modernity simply; or a revivalism which ignores it. An alternative view rests on an analysis of culture and the enlightenment process of secularization to which the Church reacted by closing in on itself until the Second Vatican Council affirmed the legitimate autonomy of the secular. The Church itself, partly to blame for secularization through its practical demystification of nature and attempt to coercively supplant all pre- and non-Christian religious experience, should engage modernity while giving witness to human dignity and promoting a more human culture. Such a constructive recovery of Christian culture must avoid both politicization and moralism.

Political and comprehensive liberals are both pessimistic about finding a satisfactory way to resolve the debate over whether and how to expose students in public schools to religion. An examination of John Tomasi's Liberalism beyond Justice and William Galston's Liberal Pluralism reveals that a central cause of this pessimism is the presumption that an education for autonomy must encourage students to become rational choosers of their beliefs. This essay suggests that it is possible to found an education for autonomy on the more modest goal of ensuring that students have a reasonable ability to exit from their communities when they feel that membership is too painful. An education for exit would involve exposing students at the high school level to alternative religious beliefs to ensure they are aware that it might be possible to lead tolerable lives and achieve salvation outside of their communities of origin.

Philippine foreign policy is important to the United States for several reasons. The epigram describing the Filipinos as the most occidental of the Orientals and the most oriental of the Occidentals, emphasizes the Philippines as potentially one of the world's most important cultural bridges between these two worlds. It combines some of the best features of both areas and offers the possibility of giving each world an insight into the other. From the American standpoint the Philippines is often thought of as a show window in the Orient, and this country has a stake not only in the success of Philippine democracy, but also the Philippines provides some testimony to the fairness of American colonial policy.

In this essay, the investigation of United States images of Spain and Spanish images of North Americans serves as a point of departure in the search for larger patterns in intercultural relations — patterns that encompass far more of humanity than the two countries under consideration. My basic premise is that personal, psychic factors often lie at the heart of images that representative thinkers of a particular culture at a given moment form of other cultures. Personal, psychic factors lie also at the heart of an issue that has been central to history since the dawn of the modern age: the clash between modernity and traditionalism. The essential points of this article could have been made just as well by contrasting the mutual relationships between virtually any two national cultures, providing only that one was rather highly developed and modern, the other relatively backward economically and traditional or even primitive in social-political organization. I base my study on mutual images of North Americans and Spaniards in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries simply because this is a subject about which I have thought at some length, even if not in much depth. Finally, if my conclusions have any validity, it derives not so much from historical methodology as from the analyses of Jungian psychology and the use of concepts such as individuation, archetypes, ego consciousness, and the personal and collective unconscious.

One reason the political theory of Plato's Republic is widely misunderstood is that its precise relationship to the political content of the early dialogues is not generally recognized. That the political views of the Republic are frequently misconstrued seems apparent. In recent years many scholars have argued that the ideal state put forward in the work is completely “utopian.” This word is used in different senses, but the sense I will concentrate on in this paper is its bearing upon questions of political reform. As I use the term, a “utopian” political theory contains proposals that are not intended to be taken seriously in terms of political reform. When I say that the ideal state discussed in the Republic is not “utopian” as these scholars maintain, I mean that Plato designed it with political reform in mind, and that he thought seriously about how to bring it into existence. This does not, however, imply that the ideal state is likely to be realized, or that Plato ever thought it was, but only that Plato wished to bring it into existence and thought this was possible, should extraordinary good fortune bring the necessary conditions into existence.

Although Dr. Johnson wanted to hear no more of the Punic Wars most of his literate English contemporaries did not agree. Early in the century, to be sure, Thomas Madox found hostility — partly a philosophic revulsion against antiquarian “trash and cinders” and partly a rationalist revolt against the past — to ancient history, and was thereby moved to insist that the knowledge of antiquities could not be impugned without impugning history itself. That this belief had hearty support in succeeding decades is attested by the avid curiosity concerning Herculaneum, the frequent reference in periodicals, and the direct appeal to ancient historians in times of crisis. This “dream of antiquity” changed with the contemporary world. If, at first, archeology—a harmless conversation piece—excited the chief response, threats to liberty, mounting problems of empire, social disorganization, and international anarchy soon drew attention to Greek cities, Hellenistic expansion, and the decline and fall of the Roman Republic and Empire. There was, it is true, but a small harvest of ancient histories, and of these only a few warrant attention. The full measure of devotion must be sought elsewhere: men gained their knowledge of the ancient world not from histories alone but from literature, philosophy, and law.

NatoHas appeared under many labels since its creation — Guardian of Peace, Pawn of Power Politics, Savior of the West, and Harbinger of War. All of them probably have some validity. But no matter which sobriquet is most applicable, the most significant feature of the alliance may be that it has survived twelve years of continuous challenges. By its survival it has become the symbol of America's abandonment of isolationism. In an age in which foreign policy plays the kind of role in domestic politics that would have been unthinkable in the nineteenth century, NATO represents a coherence in foreign policy that transcends party differences. Conceived under the Republican 80th Congress, put into effect by President Truman and Secretary Acheson, and expanded by President Eisenhower and Secretary Dulles, NATO now takes its place with the New Deal as a major factor in American life in the mid-twentieth century.

Among the revolutions in France since 1789 one, the Revolution of 1830, has been singularly neglected by historians in this century, and neither in this century nor the preceding one has it attracted much attention from any but the political historians. No monograph on the whole story of the Revolution has ever been published, and the standard account, in Lavisse's Histoire de France contemporaine, appeared nearly forty years ago. The economic and sociological dimensions of the event have been generally ignored. Consequently, the Revolution of 1830 is ordinarily seen as a political movement arising out of the unpopularity of Charles X and his ministers and out of their attempt to arrogate the sovereign power to the crown.

Hegel's Philosophy of Right is the first work to make a doctrine of progress in history conceived as an organized whole into an integral, even culminating, part of a systematic, philosophic political teaching. Certainly Kant and Rousseau, at the least, preceded Hegel in giving history an emphasis soon to be seen as characteristically modern; yet Hegel nevertheless transformed and deepened their rather tentative approaches into something more solid and comprehensive, perhaps also more grandiose, speculative and questionable. In establishing the view that history could be made theoretically intelligible, and an essential element of political philosophy, he produced a concept of historical progress which is free of utopian idealism, distinguishable from theologically inspired precursors, compatible with freedom (indeed, history becomes the story of the realization of freedom), and an alternative to a quite different form of historicism which thought insight into history would justify anti-rationalist realism or subjectivism.

InTheYears following the second World War, Western diplomacy was confronted with staggering problems. Some of these have been results of long developments, others of more recent origin. Meetings between Mussolini and Hitler and between the dictators and Western statesmen are glaring examples of a new brand of diplomacy which was characterized by lack of preparation through traditional diplomatic channels. Subsequent events disclosed not only some weaknesses of democracies in international politics but exposed even more the lack of good faith and other destructive tendencies of totalitarian diplomacies. Not only did Western foreign policy fail to answer adequately the challenges of a crumbling world order, but totalitarian diplomacy also erred often and gravely. Mussolini's diplomatic mistakes caused the doom of Fascist Italy and Hitler's blunders contributed greatly to the destruction of Nazi Germany. The Nazi-Soviet deal and Stalin's overextended faith in Hitler are prize examples of diplomatic miscalculations.