January 1939, the eve of World War Two, Waldemar Gurian and several of his colleagues, after months of meetings and negotiations, published the first issue of the Review of Politics. It realized a project dear to the hearts of Gurian and the others who had felt the need for a journal with a new blend of ideas. Tucked away on the inside back cover of that first issue and every issue for many years afterward were these simple words: “THE REVIEW OF POLITICS, without neglecting the analysis of institutions and techniques, is primarily interested in the philosophical and historical approach to political realities.” Over the years I have heard several explanations for the brevity and succinctness of the statement. Perhaps it was in keeping with the directness of the times or its war-worried atmosphere. From what I have come to know, however, given the personalities involved in the founding of the journal, this simple and straightforward statement of purpose was, as one of the subsequent editors said, basically what they intended to do.

Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education is designed to provide the education necessary to produce citizens guided by the obligations of natural law. A careful examination of his recommendations, however, reveals that his education does not in fact teach children to obey the law of nature directly. Instead, it teaches them to obey the law of opinion or reputation. At the same time, he encourages children to see themselves as rational and therefore free. The law of reputation provides the necessary restraint to balance the desire for liberty, and the desire for liberty ensures that citizens must respect others in order to win their esteem. Respect for others' rights, an essential element of Lockean natural law, emerges from this specific combination of the law of reputation and the love of liberty.

By exploring Addams's lifelong fascination with work, this essay analyzes the ways in which her understanding of work fundamentally shaped her wider political vision. For Addams, work was the foundation of not only a personal sense of identity, but also a collective democratic character. The workplace had the potential to be the model of a cooperative community, providing a venue for social solidarity and civic reciprocity. By working together, Americans would develop a more cosmopolitan and inclusive politics. In short, the essay argues that Addams's political thought was an attempt to revitalize democracy by giving meaning to work. It concludes by suggesting that her arguments can be applied to many contemporary political problems, and that today's democratic theory and practice would be enlivened by a renewed attention to work.

In skirmishes over the interpretive turn, the work of Charles Taylor is frequently cited as representing the state of the art. Yet a systematic assessment of Taylor's interpretivism in light of the most salient criticisms made against it has not been conducted. This paper argues that Taylor's interpretivism withstands the strongest criticisms made of it so far, and therefore is an essential resource for revitalizing the interpretive turn. Although it is widely acknowledged in the secondary literature that Taylor's interpretivism rests on ontological claims about human agency, this paper presents a novel justification for this thesis as derived from a Heideggerian phenomenology of moods. It also presents two novel ways in which a defense of Taylor's interpretivism helps to bridge the gap between empirical social science research and normative political and ideological critique. In the latter discussion, it draws on Taylor's most recently published work.

The article examines the recent debate on a genuinely realist perspective in political philosophy and argues that the core idea of realism is a certain type of ethical theory. In spite of the notorious polemic against “moralism” in politics that is characteristic of realist thinkers since Machiavelli, political realism as put forth in the current debate is not to be understood as a strictly fact-oriented perspective on politics, but rather as a perspective that itself is founded on a theory of political ethics. This peculiarly realist theory of political ethics can be characterized by its focus on the theoretical importance of political application problems, by a genuine priority principle underlying its understanding of political ethics, by its distinctive understanding of the concept of legitimacy and, finally, by its claim that any form of ethics, as far as it is concerned with political questions, is necessarily ambivalent in character.

Jeff Broadwater, a Barton college history professor and the author of one of the three biographies reviewed in this essay, recently began a public lecture on James Madison's presidency with the following story. A decade ago, Garry Wills, Broadwater notes, wrote the biography of Madison for an American presidency series, edited by the late Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and published by Times Books. The Madison volume in this series contains only two illustrations: a portrait of Madison on the dust jacket and another adjacent to the title page. The portrait pictured next to the title page in the initial run of this book is of, well, James Monroe.