In The Spirit of the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church is striving to redefine its relationship with the forces that exert great influence on the life of man. The epoch contemporary with ourselves assigns signal importance to the sciences. To these man in our time looks for norms pertinent to virtually all the spheres of his existence … and therewith for his future wellbeing (cf. the conciliar Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, par. 5).

Political Science has long been interested in opinion. It is supposed that expressed views are indicators of behavior or potential behavior and are therefore worthy of attention as aids in understanding the present and predicting the future. While there can be little doubt that people's feelings guide their actions, we can sometimes be deceived because manifest opinion may be merely an epiphenomenon derivative from other factors, rather than vice versa. This is a problem most evident when trying to relate the true designs of an ideological movement's leadership to its pronouncements.

The great paradigm of faith in Christian literature from Paul's Epistle to the Romans to Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, has been the faith of Abraham. The story of Abraham, the story of a patriarch who trusted against all odds in a divine promise of posterity, has lent itself to this by its very simplicity. To Paul, converted from Pharisaism to Christianity, Abraham was the model of the man who finds righteousness through faith in God's promise rather than through observance of God's law. To Kierkegaard, coming after Kant's ethical interpretation of Christianity, Abraham was the model of the religious man as distinct from the ethical man. There is no doubt a parallel between Kierkegaard's religious man and Paul's man who finds righteousness through faith in God's promise. There is, moreover, a real parallel between both of these and Abraham. Yet there is also a difference all along the line. The difference becomes particularly apparent when Abraham's alternative is considered. The alternative was not to be an ethical man nor even to find righteousness through observance of God's law. It was to rely upon his own devices to secure the posterity which he so desired, to take the normal human precautions, to raise the son of his concubine, to refuse to offer his son in sacrifice.

International relations have been the object of widespread study and review in the United States since World War I. Attention has focussed alternately on the flow of events, the goals and standards, and the underlying principles of world affairs. Primary emphasis has been directed to empirical, normative and theoretical problems. Along the way, scholars, statesmen and observers have singled out certain factors from the myriad dimensions of international society. Students have looked for concepts and methodologies by which order and meaning could be derived in this as in other complex fields.

President Woodrow Wilson spent over one-half year in Paris to negotiate the Treaty of Versailles. Upon his return he submitted the Treaty to the Senate for confirmation. A deadlock between the Executive and the Legislature twice prevented passage of the Treaty. The issue extended to the presidential election of 1920 when many voters supported Warren G. Harding convinced that he was more likely to bring about the entry of the United States into the League than his Democratic opponent.

Each Time a crisis looms in the European Community, one hears the question: “Has the European Community passed the point of no return or will this crisis end it?”1 The Community of six states, created in Luxembourg in 1952 and expanded in Brussels in 1958, has survived each of these crises and is now reaching political maturity. The question becomes less “Will the Community survive?” and more “What kind of political and economic entity will the Community become?”

Between 1940 and 1946, carastrophe befell France and the French Empire. In Europe, France collapsed before the German war machine and submitted to a humiliating treaty and to military occupation. Nor did Liberation and the triumph of de Gaulle's Free French Movement fully revive France's spirit. She had played a relatively small part in the Allied victory and in the conferences of the Powers that sought to restore the peace. The grandeur of France's past, her military tradition, and her civilization meant little in the world of 1946.

The problem of community, as Proudhon understands it, is to reconcil individual freedom with social peace. His political theorizing can best be seen as a prolonged effort to achieve this reconciliation. Proudhon was not at all original in placing the problem of community, as thus conceived, at the top of his agenda. He was simply responding in the usual way to the challenge presented by the Revolution to all writers on politics in early nineteenth-century France.- By disrupting social order at the same time that it awakened demands for freedom, the Revolution had made an answer to the problem of community both urgent and difficult. A reconstructed French community both free and safe was clearly needed, but how could it be achieved? If pressing demands for freedom were met, a tenuous social peace would be endangered, while if peace were secured, demands for fredom would go unsatisfied. The need and the difficulty of reconciling peace and freedom under the circumstances prevailing in France led Proudhon, like so many of his contemporaries, to devote himself to finding an answer to the problem of community.

Ernst Cassirer's renown is the fame of a philosopher, not of a political theorist. Amongst his voluminous writings only The Myth of the State is regarded as a political treatise and its precise political character is problematic. Nevertheless, the rudiments of a Cassirer political philosophy may be derived from an exposition of his understanding of culture and from an examination of his views of freedom, myth, and the state. Cassirer extolled freedom, and he sought to “combat” myth. His own fulfillment of man's “progressive self-liberation,” however, presents difficulties which are the subject matter of this essay.

African Socialism represents the most comprehensive doctrinal and programmatic attempt to deal with the complex problems of the African continent. During the second decade of the second half of the twentieth century, in the effort to deal with those problems, African Socialism established itself as the ideological rationale for mass movements of solidarity in Ghana, Senegal, Tanzania, Guinea, and Mali. Outside the immediate confines of these countries, the influence of African Socialism has been impressive. Even countries as traditionally conservative as Ethiopia and Liberia have had to acknowledge its existence and in some cases adopt at least its vocabulary.

Tradition has it that upon returning from his first Sicilian voyage in 388/387 B.C. Plato founded the Academy. It is also commonly held that, following the example of the Pythagorean brotherhoods with which he had come in contact in Southern Italy, he intended to make the Academy a center of philosophicor scientific studies, as well as a cult society (thiasos) dedicated to the worship of the Muses. Plutarch points out that “in his writings Plato advanced some excellent arguments concerning the laws, the government and the commonweal. But even more important is the fact that he inspired his pupils to positive political action.“ This suggests the further possibility, hardly ever considered, that the Academy itself was indeed a school for aspiring statesmen — perhaps the first organized “institute of political science” in the Western world.

Popular elections are generally assumed to be the crucial element of democratic governments, but the significance of elections is so widely assumed that it is rarely examined. Although studies of voting behavior abound, there are relatively few theoretical or empirical investigations of the effects of voting on the total political system. To clarify our thinking, and as a preliminary to contemporary discussion, it may prove helpful to reexamine some major works of premodern European and American political thought.

Edward Lasker, German parliamentarian, was born on August 14, 1829, in Jaroczin, a small village in the province of Posen, the Polish area of Prussia. The offspring of an orthodox Jewish family, the young man studied the Talmud and translated Schiller into Hebrew verse. At first he showed a preference for philosophy and mathematics but turned later to history, political science, and law. Influenced by contemporary pre-Marxian socialism, he, together with his fellow students, fought on the barricades during the revolution of 1848. It became clear to him after passing his law examinations that he could not expect an adequate appointment in the civil service of reactionary Prussia.

Perhaps never before has the reality of a just and lasting peace among nations been so ardently desired and so urgently sought. This desire is inspired not so much by a hunger for the benfits of peace as it is by a horror of the consequences if peace is not achieved.

Mosca's and Pareto's elite conceptions have had a curious fate. Mosca's work, in many ways an anticipation of Pareto's, has been overshadowed by his more brilliant and renowned antagonist from the very beginning, and perhaps only the circumstance that his American editor chose as the title for his Elementi di scienza politica the two words which fairly epitomize his theory (“the ruling class”) enables many a student of sociology to associate Mosca's name with at least a vague notion about the nature of his contribution. Pareto himself, the skeptically disinterested “maître de Céligny,” whose only ambition was to “tell the complete truth and nothing but the truth,” has generally come to be regarded as a “Karl Marx of bourgeoisie,” an intellectual precursor of Fascism, and worse. Both are seen, unjustifiably, as enemies of democracy and detractors of the “new belief in the common man.”

The political thought of Leo Strauss commands the respect and admiration of even his critics. His critical intellectual carpentry is sharp, cutting, and often rebuking. His criticism of modernity, whether it be that of Machiavelli, Max Weber, an existentialist, or a scientific political scientist, is inspired by and deeply rooted in the Greek intellectualistic essentialism, particularly that of Aristotle, and the age-old tradition of nature and natural right as is shown in his work, Natural Right and History

Today the American Foreign aid program finds itself increasingly in trouble. The last Congress slashed $500,000,000 from the fiscal 1967 AID budget. Increasing disenchantment has been expressed by Congress in regard to the unified aid program that was inaugurated by President Kennedy in 1961 to speed economic development throughout the world as one component of “the grand design” for an American foreign policy that was to rally the free world.

Dr. Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby school, was perhaps one of the most consistent totalitarians of the nineteenth century — he constitutes almost a pure type of totalitarianism and for this reason alone it is worth taking a look at his political ideas. He was also a good man — in certain respects a great man — and a study of Arnold's ideas will remind us that totalitarian theories are not always set forth by wicked men, but are often the conclusions of good ones. Two other reasons for examining Arnold's ideas may be mentioned; in the first place he had a considerable influence on a generation of Englishmen, as headmaster of Rugby; second, he is generally believed to have been a liberal, and it will I hope be clear from what follows that his was one of the most illiberal systems of politics ever set forth by English writers.

The concepts of class struggle and the leadership of the proletariat figure high among the tenets of Marxist-Leninist ideology and strategy that Soviet theoreticians deem applicable to the developing areas of the world. “A new contingent of the world proletariat — young working class movement of the newly free, independent and colonial countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America — has entered the world arena,” asserted the 1961 Program of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It is this newly emerging proletariat that hopefully is expected to convert the nationaldemocratic revolutions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America into genuine socialist revolutions of the Marxist-Leninist variety. Hence, the advancement of the working class and the promotion of class struggle have become major concerns of Soviet strategy and tactics in the Third World.

As everyone knows, an enormous revival of interest in Edmund Burke has taken place during the past twenty years or so, the period, roughly, since the end of the Second World War. Scholars, to be sure, have always been interested in him, and he was widely admired for his style, and by some for his “practical wisdom,” during the nineteenth century. But the point is that in our time he has come to be read not merely as one among a large number of other important figures in the history of political thought, but as a thinker of intense, of special, contemporary relevance. Burke is our contemporary, he is an issue, in a way that Locke is not, and Leibniz is not, and even Mill is not. Burke has not receded into what Lovejoy called the pathos of time, by which he meant that benign and even tender feeling we have for thought that is now completely, forever, a part of the past — and so neither defines us nor menaces us.