Simone Weil had an ambivalent attitude toward Marx. While she thought that the young Marx's celebration of labor had “lyrical accents,” she ultimately believed that Marx had neglected his own insights, embracing a blind worship of mechanization and a theory of history and revolution that was insufficiently attentive to the material conditions of workers. Marx, in her view, was insufficiently materialist and excessively wedded to a hierarchical model of science that maintained the domination of management. Weil and Marx's attitudes toward the dignity of labor and the necessary conditions for socialism are analyzed. The most significant cleavage between them is ultimately due to the differing manner in which they conceive of the relationship between thought and action. Through this comparison, the philosophical underpinnings of the two radically different conceptions of labor and its dignity as a human activity are explained.

While Isaiah Berlin considered himself principally as a political theorist in the liberal tradition, his was an unorthodox liberalism in both method and substance, rooted in the confluence of three traditions—British, Russian, and Jewish. Unlike many liberals, he wrestled with the tension between universalism and particularism, and also between individualism and communalities. He rejected all monistic approaches to morality (including liberal monism) but repudiated as well the moral relativism of much modern thought, espousing instead value pluralism. While we cannot arrive at a universally valid conception of the summum bonum, we can specify the summun malum—the great evils of the human condition. Berlin saw political theory as a branch of moral philosophy but drew political morality from political life rather than imposing it on politics. The range of goods and principles that human beings rightly prize cannot be combined into harmonious wholes in either our individual or collective existence. Some goods exclude others, and we must choose among them.

The relationship between politics and religion in the United States has been studied by political scientists from many perspectives. Church-state relations, religious bloc voting, political issues with strong religious overtones—these and other politico-religious phenomena have long been subjects of scholarly activity within the discipline. However, the use of religious symbols in politics has been much neglected by political scientists (though not by sociologists, psychologists and scholars). Long ago Harold D. Lasswell said “It is of the utmost importance to political science to examine in detail … the processes of symbolization.” Religious symbolization in American politics urges itself upon the political analyst, moreover, because of “the unique relationship” which has existed between religion and politics throughout the history of the nation. And there are, perhaps, no richer and more concentrated examples of politico-religious symbolism than those found in the campaign oratory to which the American public is regularly subjected. Candidates for the American presidency have long resorted to the manipulation of such symbols. Hence, a presidential campaign is a good situation for the study of the political use of religious symbols. The 1972 contest between George McGovern and Richard Nixon is an excellent case study. Frequently characterized by the public press as an election to choose “a national minister” because of the manifest use of politico-religious symbols by the candidates, the campaign provides ample evidence of the uses to which religious symbolization can be applied in American politics.

Conventional wisdom pins responsibility for the Vietnam War primarily on Lyndon B. Johnson. This essay presents a revisionist argument, attempting to shift primary responsibility for the war on President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The case rests heavily on John F. Kennedy's challenge to historians: “How the hell” can they evaluate presidential performances unless they know the “real pressures” and the “real alternatives” confronting the occupiers of the Oval Office. In assessing those pressures, this essay concludes that Eisenhower had the unique luxury of a clean break from President Truman's commitments, thanks to the Vietnamese victory at Dien Bien Phu, and a clear-cut alternative provided by the Geneva Accords. Unfortunately, Eisenhower chose to ignore the Accords, committed America to South Vietnam, and played a major role, during and after his presidency, in creating the heavy pressures that shaped Johnson's Vietnam decisions.

The Marxian idea of the great proletarian revolution that will end the pre-history of mankind and inaugurate its true history sprang into public effectiveness through the Communist Manifesto. Well known as is the progress of this idea after its formulation and publication of 1848, we know comparatively little about the process of its formation in the preceding decade. The main cause of this unsatisfactory state must be sought in the fact that the materials for a study of the genesis of he idea have been completely available only since 1932. In the meantime, the monographic literature on the subject has clarified many details; but a comprehensive study is still a desideratum.

Most of the recent attempts to demonstrate the poverty of liberalism and political realism have accepted the realist interpretation of violence with few reservations. For example, few political theologians, theologians of hope, and theologians of revolution have reconsidered or modified this component of the realist perspective even as they have tried to dismantle realism. It is now time to splash what Holmes called “cynical acid” on this assumed orthodoxy, especially but not only in Protestantism. The pacifist perspective on war and violence deserves a hearing which this stacked jury of realists and their critics have refused to grant. This refusal results in part from Reinhold Niebuhr's critique of pacifism, widely considered even by pacifists to be trenchant and compelling.

Continuing philosophic doubt concerning the moral foundations of human rights threatens to undermine the growing belief in liberal democracy. This doubt has its roots in the reaction against the Enlightenment and is evident even in John Rawls's retreat from the apparent universalism of his theory of justice. There are good grounds, however, for regarding the traditional Western belief in moral and political autonomy as a sound basis for human rights and liberal democracy.

Several recent commentaries on Hannah Arendt's political thought have suggested strong connections and affinities between Arendt and Nietzsche or between Arendt and various later Nietzschean, aestheticist, or postmodernist thinkers. But a close reading of Arendt's critiques of Nietzsche and Heidegger suggests that an overemphasis on the more Nietzschean or aesthetic aspects of Arendt's work risks obscuring some vital distinctions Arendt makes or preserves concerning politics and aesthetics. More significantly, the Nietzschean or aestheticist interpretation of Arendt tends to conceal or distort Arendt's actual, highly original, and more promising response to various facets of the modern political condition.

In the years preceding the Great Famine the people of Ireland were separated in space and spirit by the divisive workings of history and geography and by the survival of ancient local customs that were feudal and in some instances, tribal in origin. In 1825, according to a contemporary observer, there were “different districts in Ireland almost as unlike each other as any two countries in Europe.” A thousand light years and more separated the Georgian splendor of Dublin from the rude Gaelic society of the West. And in all the provinces there were pockets where distinctive local cultures stubbornly endured; like the baronies of Bargy and Forth, in the extreme southeast corner of Wexford, whose inhabitants clung to a Chaucerian dialect until the middle of the century, or the fishing village of Claddagh, outside the city of Galway, where the people maintained a severe aloofness, marrying among themselves and ignoring outsiders.

Anarchism is one of those concepts about which there generally is deep ignorance or profound misunderstanding.* “In the popular mind,” says Bertrand Russell, “an Anarchist is a person who throws bombs and commits other outrages, either because he is more or less insane, or because he uses the pretencse of extreme political opinions as a cloak for criminal proclivities.” Yet in the history of political thought, as well as in the history of social movements, anarchism has played a role which cannot be overlooked.

William Ockham, the Venerabilis Inceptor and the Doctor plus quam subtilis, started his academic career simply as a theologian and philosopher who did not have, or at least did not evince, the slightest interest in political questions. By 1324 or at least by 1327, he had composed all his purely theological or philosophical works of which we have any knowledge. In all these writings there is no trace of any political idea worth mentioning. Even the struggle about the Franciscan ideal of poverty had left no impression on the lines written by Ockham prior to 1327. While he was in England he was either too remote from the theatre of war or (and this seems to be more likely) he was too much engrossed in the construction of his conceptualistic system of philosophy and theology. In any case, we know from his own words that he did not take part in the struggle about poverty—not even to the extent of reading the pertinent documents—before or during his enforced stay at Avignon until the beginning of 1328.

According to Aquinas's view, while the mandate that political authority be instituted and exercised is an immediate consequence of the natural law precept that the common good be promoted, the question of who possesses political authority is settled by customary law. Samuel Beer's rival interpretation, one of the few attempts to discern Aquinas's view on political authority, is incompatible with Aquinas's explicit remarks on these matters. The present account provides an interpretation that both fits Aquinas's few explicit remarks about the source and form of political authority and explains the terseness of his remarks on that subject.

Burke is recognized as master of a language highly figurative, full of grace and telling images. But the imagery of nonfiction prose is not so much studied as the imagery of poetry, drama, and fiction. It should be. It reveals a great deal about a thinker. I have not studied Burke's imagery to spy on his personal life, conscious or subconscious, as some students of other writers do, nor have I tried to evaluate his style. I have used it as an oblique way of getting at the meaning of some of his concepts and I think it reveals something about his place in the history of ideas, making him a stalwart of eighteenth-century ways of thinking, instead of a harbinger of the nineteenth century.

This article argues that we can best understand the Massachusetts patriot James Otis as a practical political thinker whose writings reacted to changing circumstances and to other writers. He began his career arguing that the British Constitution and natural law both mandated that Parliament not tax unrepresented colonists, but when Blackstone published his opinion that Parliament had a natural and constitutional right to compel the submission of the colonists, Otis became convinced that, however valid his argument had been in theory, it would never convince Parliamentarians. Ultimately he engaged the problem of imperial structure, trying to collapse the political distance between the imperial periphery and the imperial center to overcome the constitutional distance that threatened to separate them for good.

… if all of us who come from Nietzscheism, from nihilism, or from historical materialism, said in public that we were wrong and that there are moral values and that in the future we shall do what is necessary to establish and illustrate them, don't you believe this would be the beginning of a hope?

The article is a comparative study of Hegel and Marx on the nature and function of the political state and it argues that Marx's critique of Hegel on this topic is aimed not at the “idealism” of the state, which concerns the principle of universal freedom, but rather at the “material” presuppositions of the state. Indeed, Marx's critique of political institutions is premised upon the way in which they are infected with the egoism and self-seeking of civil (bürgerliche) society. The relationship between the views of Hegel and Marx on these points is explored by (1) giving an exegesis of Hegel's conception of civil society as a foundation for freedom, (2) examining Marx's critique of Hegel's theory of the state, (3) distinguishing the Hegelian and Marxian philosophical conceptions of freedom, the individual, and community, and (4) evaluating the fairness and cogency of Marx's critique of Hegel.

J. G. A. Pocock's Machiavellian Moment has become an authoritative source for our understanding of the republican tradition, the place Aristotle holds as its founder, and its adversarial relation to liberalism. In this article it is argued that Pocock exaggerates the republican character of Aristotle's thought in a way that ignores the extent to which stability and prosperity, as opposed to the kind of virtue fostered by political participation, are among the chief practical ends of the Politics. This suggests that Pocock's strict opposition between republican and liberal “paradigms” is an artificial and distorting imposition on the tradition, one more apt to limit than to broaden our understanding of the fundamental alternatives it contains.

Interest in natural law theory regularly revives but the question of whether Aquinas' classic version is viable depends on whether his doctrine has the resources to respond to the classic early modern critiques that were made of it. It is argued that he does have the resources to so respond, although the response pushes the ultimate philosophic question back to the issue of the validity of his natural theology.