The characteristically Aristotelian defense of the city's authority over its members is summarized in the statements “every city exists by nature” and “man is by nature a political animal.” These doctrines distinguish Aristotle not only from such of his predecessors as the Sophists and Plato but also from two leading schools of contemporary political thought, liberalism and Marxism. Aspiring to assess the merits of Aristotle's unique approach to the problem of political authority, this paper examines Aristotle's teaching on the relationship between nature and the city. This relationship is shown to be far more complex than is implied in the doctrine that the city is natural. I conclude by wondering why Aristotle addressed the problem of political authority with a doctrine he shows to be merely provisional and why he addressed it with this particular provisional doctrine.

The Lion and the Unicorn has remained the most obscure of Orwell's major works, condemned both as a propagandistic attempt to enlist the British left in the war effort and for its erroneous prediction that the war could not been won without a socialist revolution in Britain. Yet it can also be read as Orwell's greatest single attempt to define the values of the democratic socialism to which he adhered from 1936 until his death. Patriotism represented for Orwell not the temporary need to fight for one's country, but the essential decency and democratic bias of British customs and institutions, which he believed could be wedded to socialism without producing totalitarianism. The preservation of these qualities he identified in particular with the working classes, which illuminates his views of them in his later works and demonstrates the continuity of Orwell's thought on this important political issue.

Declaring his departure from the modes and orders of his predecessors— especially the creators of imaginary republics and principalities (men like Plato, Aristotle and Augustine) — Machiavelli undertakes to show “whoever understands” a new and more promising road to political salvation and personal well-being. So compelling is Machiavelli's rhetoric that we seem to have forgotten just how “realistic” or “moderate” Machiavelli's predecessors we're, and how “unrealistic” or “immoderate” Machiavelli's own teaching is. This essay attempts to bring to light the extremism which underlies Machiavelli's realism and raises doubts about his ability to provide his readers the security he promises.

President Truman's statesmanship consists in the fact that his administration's foreign policy fused moral principle and national self-interest and that his articulation of foreign policy educated citizens in the principles of the American regime and in the nature of the threat to it. The Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan address vital strategic interests, but Truman's conception of the national interest contained a lucid sense of political meaning and purpose in his understanding that the perpetuation of freedom in America required a resolute defense of republicanism elsewhere in the world. Like Lincoln, Truman was committed to the prudent containment of an expansionist power, and for Truman, as for Lincoln, the survival of the Union meant above all the preservation of a regime devoted to the principles of the Founders. NSC-68 crystallized containment policy, uniting power with principle in a strategy that matched military means to political ends.

Kant's political philosophy involves more than a deduction of a normative model of institutions from a set of normative premises. Certain empirical premises must be added to Kant's argument. In this paper the author argues that many of Kant's own empirical assumptions are doubtful if not false. A sketch is then made of a model of institutions that can be derived from Kantian normative principles together with more plausible empirical assumptions.