In April 1929 the trustees of the University of Chicago, in the midst of an unprecedented boom on the stock exchange, chose Robert Maynard Hutchins, the thirty-year-old dean of the Yale Law School, to be the fifth president. During the twenty-two years that followed, Hutchins made an impression upon the organization and the life of the young university of a kind such as his sponsors for the office and the newspaper public, which enjoyed the spectacle of a youthful rising star, hardly expected. He made this impression as a student, a thinker and a teacher. He made it not, as the times prompted him to do, by trying to keep the University abreast of the morning newspaper, which is dead the next day, but by trying to raise it toward the philosophical heights of Aristotle and the poetic heights of Homer, whose ideas and words are as fresh now as more than two millenniums ago.

When in 1930 Henry Seidel Canby scrutinized the neo-classic philosophy of Harvard professor Irving Babbitt, his article was considered a final examination by the editors of the Saturday Review Literature. They entitled it “Post Mortem.” But Babbitt's views, known as the New Humanism, have been tough enough to outlive than one literary critic's autopsy. Older than his rhetoric, Babbitt's philosophy remains vital today. It is more than a mere obstacle to Ph.D. candidates in English literature or political science. assumes a pressing relevance as Americans toward the middle century seek peace of mind in an armed and inexplicable world nations far from united.

Edmund Burke was at once a chief exponent of the Ciceronian doctrine of natural law and a chief opponent of the “rights of man.” In our time, which is experiencing simultaneously a revival of interest in natural-law theory and an enthusiasm for defining “human rights” that is exemplified by the United Nations' lengthy declaration, Burke's view of the natural juridic order deserves close attention.

Unlike Bolingbroke and Hume, whose outward politics in some respects resembled the great Whig statesman's, Burke was a pious man. “The most important questions about the human race Burke answered … from the Church of England's catechism.” He takes for granted a Christian cosmos, in which a just God has established moral principles for man's salvation. God has given man law, and with that law, rights; such, succinctly, is Burke's premise in all moral and juridical questions.

During the first years of the American federal republic, Europe was being overrun by French revolutionary forces and ideas. Nation after nation had fallen to the revolutionaries–first weakened by propaganda and subversive organizations, then subdued by soldiery, finally converted into subordinate allies. Watching these successes, some Americans feared that the Atlantic was too narrow to keep revolutionary arms and ideology away. Indeed, the ideology seemed already to permeate the country.

American relations with the successful French nation had become tense and strained shortly after France and Britain went to war in 1793. Many people thought the country had been needlessly endangered by mismanagement of our foreign relations in such a way as to antagonize an otherwise friendly French government. Others thought the United States had been imperilled by too great a toleration of pro-French and revolutionary elements among us, who concealed diabolical designs against American security underneath their very vocal admiration for liberty, equality, and fraternity.

The turning in the long road which brought Ireland to her independence was found by a hard-minded, persistent leader given to apparent paradoxes who, strange to say, dropped from the vanguard before his country reached her present status as a Republic. Eamon de Valera, soldier, prisoner of three governments, President, insurrectionist, opposition chieftain and Prime Minister, exercised a dominating influence during the determining state of Anglo-Irish relations in this century. Tagged as an extremist, he was rejected die extremists. Saddled with the moderation of authority, he was overthrown by the moderates. Acclaimed as King of Ireland and decried as a trimmer, he held a leadership fraught with superficial inconsistencies.

For Marxism history is the process by which man transforms himself by transforming the economic conditions of his existence through work. The expression of this process on the social level is the class struggle through which the rising class, corresponding to the economic infrastructure of the future, tends to substitute itself for the exploiting class which is the expression of the outworn infrastructure. To exist is to engage in this conflict and thus participate in the movement of history. Now very often Christians, in order to oppose Marxism, remain on the Marxist plane. They are satisfied to set up one social doctrine against the other. We propose to show in this article that while it is true that there is a Christian social doctrine, and one superior to that of Marxism, the true superiority of Christianity does not lie in this. Its superiority consists, on the contrary, in the fact that it has not only a social doctrine but very different dimensions as well and is thereby capable of giving an integral interpretation of human existence while Marxism only touches the surface of it.