The theme of the second Nixon administration appears to be “Save the Presidency.” It is clear that Mr. Nixon views his best defense against critics to be the claim of a constitutional imperative to defend his office. And, he continually reminds us, it is an obligation to defend not only the Presidency, but the strong Presidency.

Mr. Nixon's attachment to the strong Presidency is more than a protective strategy. It grows out of American practice and recent theory. His language and themes are predictable within our political system. In American national politics, substantive issues and questions of institutional roles are continually entangled.

Liberal political thought has fractured into “classical” and “modern” camps. This division is rooted in differing reactions to the rise of capitalism and democracy, which are institutional outgrowths of liberal principles, unanticipated by its seminal thinkers. Both “classical” and “modern” liberalism are led astray by classifying liberal democracy as a kind of state. But democracies are not states; they are selforganizing systems. When the nature of this error is grasped, a more coherent liberal vision emerges, where the key tension in liberal society is between selforganizing systems and instrumental organizations. Possibilities in public policy take on new dimensions as well.

The world we know is largely the institutional outcome of liberalism's political triumph, first in the West and increasingly worldwide. Yet today liberal thought is deeply divided against itself and, in this division, often unable to comprehend a world in many ways its product. This division grows primarily from tensions between two liberal institutions: liberal, or representative, democracy and the market, and also from the near universal failure of liberals to grasp democratic government's unusual systemic character. Tensions between liberal democracy and the market are central issues, whereas the character of democratic government receives far less attention. Yet how the first issue is evaluated depends in part on understanding the last. Liberalism has strengthened the intellectual, legal, economic and political status of individuals within society, emphasizing equality of status for all people.

Hannah Arendt's last work, The Life of the Mind, was published in 1978 in two volumes entitled, Thinking and Willing. She planned to write a third volume, “Judging,” and in fact had just begun writing it the day she died. Instead of the final book, “Judging,” Willing, the second volume of The Life of the Mind, contains excerpts from her lectures on Kant's political philosophy and theory of judgment given at the New School for Social Research in 1970. From these excerpts we can get some idea of Arendt's theory of judgment, although we will never know her final thoughts on this subject since she intended to revise and expand the lectures for the “Judging” volume.

In poland, unlike the other satellites, Communist policy toward the Church in the past ten years has been largely cautious and at times even conciliatory. There were no wholesale persecutions, no spectacular trials like those of Mindszenty or Stepinac. That is not to say that the Communists were willing to tolerate the rival claims of the Church to shape the mind and soul of the population. They merely found it wiser to pursue their goal slowly. The progress toward that goal, involving among other things the signing of a bilateral agreement, provides some insights into the course and outcome of a seemingly mild Communist policy.

Foundation is a crucial concept in Hannah Arendt's work. She was especially interested in modern attempts, successful and unsuccessful, to found new bodies politic. Arendt maintained, however, that totalitarian movements were hostile to the project of foundation. Far from seeking to stabilize the world, totalitarianism set the world in motion and tried to keep it moving. But when we turn to National Socialist ideology itself we discover that foundation was vital to the Nazi project; Hitler understood himself as the founder of his people. Arendt's own interpretation of Nazism is mistaken, but I believe that her general theory of foundation can help us to make sense of the National Socialist experience. This article examines the project of foundation in Hitler's Weltanschauung and redeploys Arendt's concepts to explain his unsuccessful attempt to create a new body politic.

Communitarians are derided for their commitment to closed borders. According to their critics, if we balance the claims of cultural preservation (deployed primarily by wealthy countries) against the claims of economic betterment (deployed primarily by the very poor), the correct moral ordering will prioritize the claims of economic betterment, and thus support claims for open borders over closed borders. Yet, this standard way of framing the debate ignores the deep connection between cultural claims and freedom of movement. In the near-exclusive focus on the relationship between cultural preservation and the alleged importance of closed borders, free movement advocates have lost sight of how frequently culture bolsters claims in favor of freedom of movement. I argue that cultural claims should not be ignored in discussions of free movement. To do so fails to give a full account of the reasons we have to favor free movement, oftentimes across borders.

Most policy and normative problems with nuclear weaponry arise in the context of extended deterrence; that is, deterrence of attacks on friends or allies of a nuclear power. This article reviews the history and contradictions of post-World War II Western extended deterrent strategy, considers the sources of differences and similarities in the perspectives of the American and West German Catholic bishops on these matters, presents a logical schema of types of deterrent situations, discusses some systematic historical evidence that suggests the utility of nuclear weapons for many of these situations is often exaggerated, and, after reviewing alternative strategies, suggests a role for a very limited “countercombatant” nuclear strategy.

We propose a two-step method for studying the history of political thought roughly in line with the contextualism of the Cambridge School. It reframes the early Cambridge School as a bug-detecting program for the outdated conceptual baggage we unknowingly accommodate with our political terminology. Such accommodation often entails propositions that are inconsistent with even our most cherished political opinions. These bugs can cause political arguments to crash. This reframing takes seriously the importance of theories of meaning in the formative methodological arguments of the Cambridge School and updates the argument in light of new developments. We argue the new orthodoxy of Saul Kripke's causal theory of meaning in the philosophy of language better demonstrates the importance of contextual analysis to modern political theory.

According to Isaiah Berlin's influential interpretation, J. G. Herder (1744–1803) deserves to be recognized as the first cultural pluralist in the West, and thus also as an important historical source of the pluralistic ideas espoused by increasing numbers of political theorists today. Herder's importance actually lies in the ambivalent stance he takes toward his own pluralistic insights. That is, convinced that it is impossible to adhere to a completely pluralistic view of the world, Herder sets out to combine pluralism and its theoretical opposite (“monism”) into a novel theory of historical progress according to which history reaches its culmination in the realization of a purified form of Christianity. Contemporary pluralists have much to learn—both historically and theoretically—from Herder's confrontation with his pluralism.

Sandra Day O'Connor, the first woman on the United States Supreme Court, has been criticized by some for failing to bring a woman's perspective to the Court, and by others for acting too much like the stereotypical woman who cannot make up her mind. Both criticisms overlook the possibility that O'Connor's impact as a female is derived from the fact that she is promulgating a very specific jurisprudence—that of the feminine. However, it is in employing this jurisprudence that she undermines the potential for both a feminist jurisprudence and for a cohesive conservative bloc on the Court.

The central question guiding this essay is: what does Marx's socialism owe to classical antiquity? Underlying this question is the thesis that Marx's studies of classical Greece supply the angle of vision necessary to bring to light the hallmark of his conception of the socialist polity. The argument challenges a widespread interpretation of the connection between antiquity and socialism in Marx's work—that his socialist vision takes its bearings from the Aristotelian understanding of the relationship between necessity and leisure. In Marx's view, the fundamental legacy of antiquity was the notion of freedom as masterlessness. The roots of this legacy are in the political experience of the democratic polis, not in Aristotle's reflections on the ideal household. The core of Marx's project, then, is not to open a realm of freedom beyond necessity, but rather to create spaces for democratic action within the realm of necessity itself, to ensure that work is free and compatible with leisured activities.

Ronald Dworkin's legal essays have provoked considerable commentary on the nature of rights, law, and judging. Curiously unexplored, however, is the central claim of his work: that it presents a coherent and liberal theory of law. This article examines that claim and finds that Dworkin is most successful in establishing two propositions: (1) in “hard cases” at law there are “right answers” and (2) “articulate consistency” is the appropriate method of discovering and expressing them. Neither of these propositions, however, has any essential relation to the individual rights that he admonishes us to take seriously. Moreover, the right which Dworkin takes most seriously, “equal concern and respect,” rests upon a foundation incompatible with his argument on behalf of “right answers.” Thus, Dworkin's theory of law is neither coherent nor liberal.

Marx had a specific theory about the nature of non-European societies, and this theory determined his views on the conditions and possibilities of industrialization and modernization in non-Western countries. Yet this theory is hardly known, though it is extremely interesting and sometimes contradicts the more sweeping and general claims made on behalf of Marxism as a universal philosophy of history. Marx elaborated his views on the nature of the non-European world in numerous articles and letters, discussed it in Capital and the Critique of Political Economy, and based his conclusions on a mass of economic, historical, and sociological data. This theory is worthwhile studying both for those who are interested in Marx and for those studying modernization: it has its own difficulties, but it sheds an intriguing light on some of Marx's best insights into historical development and may help to correct some of the current models of modernization.

Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920), a self-styled “Christian Democrat” who dominated two generations of Dutch political history, has received passing mention rather than scholarly examination outside the Netherlands. Ernst Troeltsch, speaking of Kuyper's theological work, called him a key figure in the development of modern Calvinistic thought. And Michael Fogarty mentions Kuyper's influence in building “one of the most successful, and in many ways the most instructive political, economic and social movements to be found anywhere in the Christian world.” But, apart from such brief notes, there is little. We propose in this article to sketch Kuyper's career and summarize the ideas with which he attacked Liberalism.

Contemporary Augustinian scholarship is distinguished among other ways by its emphasis on Augustine's alleged contribution to the development of the modern notion of history. Except for a few sporadic references to a possible theology of history in the City of God, one finds little in the literature of the nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries to indicate that the content of that work might be of particular relevance to the problem at hand. The same is not true of the post-World War I period, which witnessed a sudden surge of interest in this hitherto neglected subject, to such an extent that there has scarcely been a major treatment of Augustine's thought written since that time which does not dwell on it at considerable length. Augustine, Langdon Gilkey has recently asserted, is “the father of the historical consciousness,” the first author to exhibit an awareness of the fundamentally historical character of human existence, the only early Christian writer to have brought the whole of history within the compass of a “purposive unity.”

Scholars studying classic political texts face an important decision: Should these texts be read as artifacts of history or as sources for still-valid insights about politics today? Competing historical and “presentist” approaches to political thought do not have a methodological dispute—that is, a disagreement about the most effective scholarly means to an agreed-upon end. They instead have an ethical dispute about the respective value of competing activities that aim at different purposes. This article examines six ethical arguments, drawn primarily from the work of Quentin Skinner, in favor of the historical approach. It concludes that while both intellectual history and presentist theory are ethically justifiable, the best justification of the former enterprise is that it can help us achieve the purposes of the latter.

This essay provides an overview of the life and theoretical concerns of Hannah Arendt. It traces the way her experience as a German Jew in the 1930s informed her analysis of totalitarianism in The Origins of Totalitarianism and her idea of the “banality of evil” in Eichmann in Jerusalem. The essay takes issue with those of Arendt's critics who detect a lack of “love of the Jewish people” in her writing. It also traces the way Arendt's encounter with totalitarian evil led to a deeper questioning of the anti-democratic impulses in the Western tradition of political thought—a questioning that finds its fullest articulation in The Human Condition and On Revolution. Throughout, my concern is to highlight Arendt's contribution to thinking “the political” in a way friendly to the basic phenomenon of human plurality. I also highlight her recovery and extension of the main themes of the civic republican tradition.

“MANY of the troubles of today reflect the distraction of minds to which a sane and balanced view of society has never been adequately presented. … No other writer … has the classical strength and sanity of Professor Green, who was never more thorough and at home than when dealing with those questions affecting citizenship in and for which, it may be said, he lived” (Bosanquet).