Although it is four decades since the United States entered World War II, some aspects of the nation's wartime experience are still virtually unstudied. Military and diplomatic historians have labored productively for many years, but historians interested in American social and intellectual developments are just beginning to turn their attention to the wartime era. Recent general studies by Richard Polenberg and John M. Blum are especially welcome since, by drawing greater attention to the period, they should stimulate further research. There is much left to be done because the war affected practically every dimension of American life. The present essay deals with one of its less obvious effects —the way in which it shaped the thinking of a whole generation on the subject of American identity.

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.

The most common assumption made about John Locke's historical sense is that he had none. In his lifetime, Locke was many things: a doctor, a philosopher, a political theorist, a policymaker and a biblical scholar. But few, if any, would say that Locke was a historian as well. Unlike Hobbes before him and Hume after him, Locke would write no history of England or of English politics. My intention in this paper then is not to make the claim that he was a “historian” in the strict sense of the word. I would therefore agree with John Pocock when he writes that Locke was the only major political writer of his age who did not try “to understand English politics through the history of English law (and English political institutions).”

The proposition advanced here is that the vast bulk of our social science findings, models, and literature, which purport to be universal, are in fact biased, ethnocentric, and not universal at all. They are based on the narrow and rather particular experiences of Western Europe (actually a much smaller nucleus of countries in central and northwest Europe) and the United States, and they may have little or no relevance to the rest of the world. A growing number of scholars, particularly those who have had long research experience in the so-called developing nations, have now come to recognize this fact; and among others new efforts are being made to reexamine the very “Western” experience on which so many of our social science “truths” and models have been based. Because these verities are still widely believed, however, by many scholars and policymakers alike, the ethnocentric biases and assumptions undergirding them need to be examined and their implications for research and policy explored.

The world is entering yet another age of economics. Virtually all the major problems which preoccupy governments are economic problems — problems of growth and limits, food and fuel, employment and inflation, productivity and expanding populations, development and justice. The official documents of the churches since Rerum Novarum (1891) seem more and more preoccupied with economics. Yet there is hardly a less developed area in the tradition of Christian thought, whether in philosophy or in theology, than the relation of Christianity to economics.

Locke is at once a traditional and a subversive author for us. As an authority for the American Founders he stands at the source of our tradition. But he was an authority for those revolutionaries because his political teaching culminates in the last chapter of the Second Treatise, a defense of the right of resistance. Insofar as we remain a revolutionary or rebellious people (with a particular proclivity to tax rebellions), Locke's political teaching lives in us. But insofar as we have become traditional and taken our revolution for granted, even coming to look at our founding with “sanctimonious reverence” and ascribing to our founders “a wisdom more than human,” as Jefferson feared we would, Locke has lost his vitality for us. It is no wonder then that we do not read his defense of the right of resistance with the care it deserves, even as we sometimes see or feel its revolutionary spirit still around us. But careful attention to the structure of Locke's argument for the right of resistance shows that he was more consistent and more radical than is usually supposed.

A number of analyses of American foreign policy suggest that over the course of some two hundred years there have been two distinct themes in the American diplomatic experience. These can be labeled the realist and idealist. At various times first one and then the other appears to have assumed at least a temporary predominance in American thinking and diplomatic activity. The classic statement of the realist approach still remains that which was offered by John Quincy Adams in 1823 in response to pressure on the United States to intervene to assist the Greeks in their war of independence against the Ottoman Turks. “Wherever the flag of freedom may be unfurled,” remarked Adams, the heartfelt sentiments and sympathy of the American people go out to those struggling for freedom. On the other hand, the United States should and could not assume a direct responsibility in such struggles. In Adams' vivid phrase, America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” The Adamsonian or realist approach to American foreign policy then posits that altruistic or moral concerns are essentially irrelevant to the real objectives of a sound national diplomacy, which are the protection of one's own sovereignty and political and economic well-being. In our external relations, then, the focus ultimately must be on power considerations, the development of our strictly personal national interests.

Although volumes are now written about basic human needs, few of them issue from the subjects of those needs: the desperately poor. And a recent Third World document warns that:

While the satisfaction of basic human needs of the people, and the eradication of mass poverty must have a high priority in economic and social development, the idea is unacceptable and erroneous that these goals can be achieved without the all-round and comprehensive economic development of the developing countries and the establishment of the New International Economic Order.

It is paradoxical that an author whose thought is widely recognized to have had a profound influence on such revolutionary thinkers as Locke, Bayle, and Rousseau should be regarded as having himself been an extreme conservative in questions of political practice. Yet such is the almost unanimous judgment of contemporary scholars on Michel de Montaigne. While Montaigne endeavored in the Essays to question radically the grounds of all accepted beliefs and practices, and specifically denounced the unreasonableness and unjustness of many laws and customs practiced in his time, it is believed that he nonetheless opposed all attempts at political innovation or reform, fearing that any such change would only make matters worse.

Of the many fascinating episodes that punctuate the diplomatic history of World War II, few have intrigued scholars more than the secret Balkan spheres-of-action agreement worked out by Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Marshal Josef Stalin at the Anglo-Soviet conference (British code-named TOLSTOY) held in Moscow in the autumn of 1944. It was late in the evening of 9 October. In his first encounter with Stalin since the meeting of the Big Three at Teheran in 1943, Churchill, believing “the moment … apt for business,” appealed to the Soviet dictator to “Let us settle about our affairs in the Balkans.” Specifically, he went on, “We have interests, missions, and agents there. Don't let us get at cross-purposes in small ways.

Since the nineteenth century, Mexican history has encompassed many social conflicts that range from local rebellions to full-scale revolutions. Church-state relations have been closely related to, and affected by, these conflicts. The struggle between church and state led to the War of the Reform (1858) and to the Cristero Rebellion (1926). Both of these armed conflicts were resolved through an improvised and cumulative process that eventually did as much to obscure the causes of conflict as to remedy them. After independence, the liberals initiated the first phase of conflict, a conflict eventually extended into the twentieth century by various advocates of a strong, secular state. The conflict began as a resistance to the efforts to reform the church and to give the state a neutral orientation and subsequently escalated into a divisive cultural war. Conservative politicians and religious leaders took up the liberal challenge with a doctrine justifying a specific political order at almost any price, thereby involving the church and the state in a mutually destructive and increasingly bitter struggle.

In this essay, the investigation of United States images of Spain and Spanish images of North Americans serves as a point of departure in the search for larger patterns in intercultural relations — patterns that encompass far more of humanity than the two countries under consideration. My basic premise is that personal, psychic factors often lie at the heart of images that representative thinkers of a particular culture at a given moment form of other cultures. Personal, psychic factors lie also at the heart of an issue that has been central to history since the dawn of the modern age: the clash between modernity and traditionalism. The essential points of this article could have been made just as well by contrasting the mutual relationships between virtually any two national cultures, providing only that one was rather highly developed and modern, the other relatively backward economically and traditional or even primitive in social-political organization. I base my study on mutual images of North Americans and Spaniards in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries simply because this is a subject about which I have thought at some length, even if not in much depth. Finally, if my conclusions have any validity, it derives not so much from historical methodology as from the analyses of Jungian psychology and the use of concepts such as individuation, archetypes, ego consciousness, and the personal and collective unconscious.

Nationalism like all political doctrines is at root normative, that is, it makes a claim that matters ought to be arranged in a certain way. The root claim of nationalism is that a nation should be self-governing. This article is concerned with the normative basis of that claim: upon what understanding of value, principle, norm, etc., does it rest? The exercise is thus abstract; it is not a concrete investigation into the causes of nationalism, and it is also less about the substantive doctrine or theory of nationalism than about what might be called its metatheory; finally, the paper does not presume to pronounce on the validity of nationalism as normative doctrine.

The debate over abortion in America is at a standstill. The pro-life and pro-choice groups, having settled firmly on incompatible premises, have nothing to say to one another. Their “debate” is only “a battle of bumper stickers between people with their minds already made up.” More importantly, they have nothing to say to all the people in the middle who feel uncomfortable with both positions. If the crux of the abortion issue is choosing between being pro-life and pro-choice, then the undecided citizen who sincerely wants his country to act rightly has the dismal opportunity of deciding whether to be anti-choice or anti-life.

The present crisis has generated intense debate over the instruments of foreign policy the United States has at its disposal and controversy over their use in particular stages of a dispute or conflict. The debate has centered over the meaning and use of power and force. A little more than a decade ago, writing On Violence in an era when its primary manifestation was within national boundaries, the American political philosopher, the late Hannah Arendt, sought to distinguish between violence and power, saying: “… power always stands in need of numbers, whereas violence up to a point … relies on implements.” Writers differ on concepts such as power and violence. Power for some is conceived as the ability of the individual or the group to impose its will on others. Power for Arendt implied the human ability to act in concert —potestas in populo; without a people or group there is no power in politics. Power for individuals and groups is linked with prestige and authority. In politics, authority requires respect either for a person or an office; its enemy is contempt or laughter directed at the person or office. In both foreign relations and domestic affairs, “violence appears as a last resort to keep … power … intact against individual challengers — the foreign enemy, the native criminal …” or to overthrow authority. It would seem, therefore, that force and violence are the prerequisites of power and power nothing but a facade. In a violent world, it is force that counts not power which is dependent on force.

The extreme rational individualism of Thomas Hobbes has been the subject of rebuttal since the publication of Leviathan in 1651. A good portion of the critiques of Hobbes have centered around his famous description of the state of nature as a condition of individualized warfare. Hobbes's contemporaries based their opposition to his individualism on the historical inadequacy of the state of nature. Filmer, for instance, complained about Hobbes's assumptions that men sprang from the earth as “mushrooms … without any obligation to another.”

It has been said of Alexis de Tocqueville that he is the most frequently quoted and least read author of all, rivaling and surpassing even William Shakespeare for this dubious honor. Virtually every American social scientist who as much as pays lip service to tradition manages to quote Tocqueville at least once. But this deference is to the author of Democracy in America, not of The Old Regime and the Revolution, for the latter book is, with the exception of one passage, neither read nor quoted. The Old Regime is neglected today because it is a political history, and today political history is not appreciated. What is “political history”?

Tocqueville's “political history” belongs to a genre of which he considered Montesquieu's “Sur la grandeur et la decadence des Romains” to be the finest example. Tocqueville thought that the nature and habits of his intellect suited him to evaluating modern societies and foreseeing their probable futures, but at the same time he believed he could do this most effectively in historical studies. While flatly denying that one can learn lessons from history in any simple sense, he did nonetheless hold that from an examination of historical particulars one can grasp the universal principles of social existence. His intention in writing The Old Regime was to enable his reader to achieve this same grasp. He, like Montesquieu, would not merely recount facts, but make known their causes and consequences and judge them. He would have to choose his facts well, so that they supported his theses. He would have to present them without making “the character of the work … visible” in the hope that “the reader would be conducted naturally from one reflection to another by the interest of the narrative.” Thus what I have called political history is understood by Tocqueville to be a selective, but not necessarily incorrect, use of the facts of history for the purposes of shedding light on the present and of teaching others to see and judge the present for themselves. Given Tocqueville's stated intention, we cannot read his work as either scientific history or political polemic.

It is now almost a third of a century since George Orwell's publication of Animal Farm made him famous in the United States. Outside of certain radical and literary circles Orwell was virtually unknown in America before 1946. He had written an occasional piece for journals like the New Republic, Dwight Macdonald's idiosyncratic Politics, plus a series of “London Letters” for Philip Rahv's radical magazine, Partisan Review. In the early 1930's Harper's had published some of his earlier works, novels like A Clergyman's Daughter and Burmese Days, and non-fiction pieces like Down and Out in Paris and London. They were largely ignored, unread, and unreviewed.

Both Jack Lively and Marvin Zetterbaum comment on the paradoxical character of Alexis de Tocqueville's teaching in Democracy in America with regard to the importance of religious belief in maintaining liberal democracy. By concentrating on the political utility of religious belief to the point of indifference as to its content, they argue, Tocqueville undermines the very belief he finds necessary to the preservation of liberty. Moreover, how can the proponent of unrestrained freedom of the press and the enlightened rationalism of “self-interest rightly understood” advocate the creation of “social myths”? Both critics conclude that Tocqueville's position is untenable. I shall argue, on the contrary, that Tocqueville's argument is internally consistent. From a democratic perspective, Christianity represents an accidental historical heritage. By adapting to democratic conditions, Christianity can persist and even have important political effects, however. It provides an essential foundation for the individual and political self-restraint necessary to maintain liberal democracy, but it exercises its influence indirectly, through the wholly liberal means of public opinion in the context of a strict separation of church and state. Because Tocqueville sees a natural source for the simplified religious beliefs necessary to maintain a liberal democracy, he does not need to advocate the inculcation of “myths.” Popular faith alone does not secure the liberty of the individual in the United States, but in the absence of widespread religious belief, neither economic “individualism” nor liberal political institutions would either.

Throughout the ages it has been held that leisure is the basis of culture. This view can be found in the Old Testament and in Plato, in Burke, Marx, Veblen, and in T. S. Eliot. Whether they were glad for it or sad, people seem to have always taken it for granted that in order to have culture one must first have leisure. Applicable to society as well as to individuals, this rule was put concisely by Dr. Johnson as follows: “All intellectual improvement arises from leisure; all leisure arises from one working for another.”