“What then does Dr. Newman mean?” The question was Charles Kingsley's, the title of his maladroit little pamphlet which provoked from Newman the stunning thunderbolt of the Apologia. That was in 1864, but the same question, free of Kingsley's tone of baffled and outraged masculinity, had been asked many times before that date. Indeed, suspicion of Newman's gorgeously serpentine prose, and so of the man himself, ran like a dark thread through Newman's Anglican and Catholic careers. Typical was the censure in 1841 of Newman's Tract Ninety by the University of Oxford's Board of Heads of Houses, which declared the tract “evaded rather than explained the sense of the Thirty-nine Articles and reconciled subscription to them with the adoption of errors which they were designed to counteract.” And 18 years later, when Newman, now a Catholic, published an article called “On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine,” an English bishop formally denounced it in Rome as “sophistical and dishonest,” while the premier English Catholic theologian termed it “the most alarming phenomenon of our times.”

Hamilton Fish Armstrong, retiring editor of the influential quarterly, Foreign Affairs, writes in its fiftieth anniversary issue: “Not since we withdrew into comfortable isolation in 1920 has the prestige of the United States stood so low.” Lest his judgment be construed as political rhetoric, it should be noted that Armstrong has been an advisor to both major political parties. And if anyone doubts that there is cause for this critique, he need only consider the following: the United States, which in the 1940's and 1950's had an “automatic majority” in votes at the United Nations, has learned in the 1960's what it means to be outvoted in this same assembly. Americans, who during and after World War II trumpeted the cause of anticolonialism and the end of aggression, are today condemned as imperialists and aggressors. And while we have been heralded since 1946 as the most powerful nation in the history of the world, a tiny and divided nation among the less developed of Southeast Asia has fought us to a standstill. Is it any wonder Armstrong can write of the decline of America and point to the loss of our prestige in the world? Or that Hans Morgenthau can say: “America no longer sets an example for other nations to emulate; in many respects it sets an example of what to avoid”

The environmental movement has produced a confusion in American politics stemming from the difficulties of classifying it according to conventional categories. Most of its warriors are young people who identify with the Counter-Culture, yet it is often denounced by hard-line radicals as diversionary. Its most substantial supporters are left-liberal suburbanites, but it also attracts individuals who have no truck with civil-rights or antiwar causes. It is future-oriented in image and rhetoric, yet its severer critics call its leaders “arch-Druids” and accuse them of trying to repeal progress.

On may 8, 1940, some 24 hours before German panzers began their blitzkrieg through the Low Countries, a small group of middle-aged men gathered informally at the Harvard Club in New York City. These men, 9 in all, represented the “old Plattsburg crowd,” the same group which had cooperated with General Leonard Wood in 1915–1917 in organizing the famous Military Instruction Camps for Business and Professional Men at Plattsburg, New York. It was almost 25 years to the day that they had first met following the sinking of the Lusitania in May, 1915, and the present discussion concerned plans for a twenty-fifth anniversary celebration.

Professor Paul Lucas has described Edmund Burke's theory of prescription as his “idea about the way in which an adverse possession of property and authority may be legitimated by virtue of use and enjoyment during a long passage of time.” The description is accurate so far as it goes. Burke certainly maintained that if one had held uncontested possession as the owner of a piece of property for a sufficiently long period of time, no earlier title to the property, however valid, could be revived and made to prevail against the occupant's title. Through the passage of time the occupant had acquired a title by prescription, and this in Burke's eyes was “the soundest, the most general, and the most recognized title … a title, which … is rooted in its principle, in the law of nature itself, and is indeed the original ground of all known property.” Burke also said: “Prescription is the most solid of all titles, not only to property, but, which is to secure that property, to Government.”

The period from roughly 1830 through the 1860's saw the growth of one of the most exotic intellectual movements ever to take root in American soil. Led by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the New England transcendentalists mounted an attack on the social, intellectual, religious and political beliefs which their fathers, not to mention their contemporaries, had blandly held to represent the ultimate of humanwisdom. If the American of the mid-twentieth century sometimes exhibits a distressing fondness for a public recital of national sins and shortcomings, the inhabitants of nineteenthcentury Boston revealed an enviable capacity for regional, if not national, self-congratulation. They surely would have agreedwith Dr. Pangloss that this was the best of all possible worlds, and why not? Was there not good reason to believe, as Oliver Wendell Holmes was later to suggest, that Boston was the Hub of the Universe?

In the “metaphysical squabbles” that Bertrand de Jouvenel has said characterize much of American political science, none has been more bitter and perplexing than the controversy surrounding the work of Leo Strauss. To the extent that one can speak of a revival of classical political philosophy in this country, the credit for it assuredly belongs to the influence of Strauss's profound scholarship. Nonetheless there is common agreement among fairminded reviewers of Strauss's writings that a “calculated obscurity” hides his message. “He does not wish to tell us, in bold propositional terms, what is on his mind,” says Robert McShea. Granted that “Strauss indulges in the … game of esoteric silences,” that his real views are often “camouflaged,” we must see these devices for what Lee McDonald suggests they are: devices to persuade the reader to “a special way of reading the ‘classics’”; they are not primarily concerned with “specific details of interpretation.”

This article will sketch a political science that is founded on principles different from those underlying the discipline at present. The major thesis is that contemporary American political science is Newtonian and interactionist in orientation in a world in which scientific thought has become field-oriented and transactionist. Political scientists are still primarily concerned with defining abstract units of analysis and exploring the relations among these units, while many natural scientists and even novelists like Lawrence Durrell have advanced to the stage of studying fields of behavior and domains of human activity. What would a transactionist political science look like? What are some of the reasons for adopting such a political science as a starting point for research and analysis?

In one of his New Yorker short stories, Donald Barthelme introduced a character named Francesca, a young woman who was a Robert E. Lee freak. Whenever she was with Thomas, the protagonist of the story, Francesca babbled on endlessly about Lee's Lost Order No. 191, or the tactics of Pickett's Charge, or the Confederate government's failure to resupply Lee's army at Amelia Court House. Even Francesca's eyes were Confederate-gray, reflecting “a lifelong contemplation of the nobility of Lee's great horse, Traveller.” However, as the anomie which usually engulfs Barthelme's characters overtook her, Francesca was finally forced to admit that “ ‘Lee was not without his faults.… Not for a moment would I have you believe that he was faultless.’ ” Thomas roused himself to ask, “ ‘What was his principal fault?’ ” To that, Francesca offered a one-word reply: “ ‘Losing,’ she said.”

In this paper I propose to examine and compare certain contemporary American conceptions of the central idea in American political thought—freedom and its synonym, liberty.

I should like to begin by recalling to your minds the Puritan Father John Winthrop's twofold definition of liberty as:

1) natural liberty, “the liberty to do as [one] lists”;

2) moral liberty, the liberty to do “only that which is good, just and honest.”

As everyone knows, the failure of the German revolution of 1848 was the loss of a great opportunity.* If the revolution had succeeded, German unification might have been consummated on a popular basis, rather than through Bismarckian authoritarianism. The result could have been a German nation-state more closely in step with the liberal-democratic age that was dawning in western Europe. Subsequent German and European history might then have been much happier than it actually turned out to be. For, by thwarting liberalism and delaying democracy, the collapse of this revolution helped to make Germany the European problem child she has been in this century.

Historians have long argued that an intimate connection exists between the failure of Europe's liberal and, in France at least, radical agitation of 1848 and the spread of pessimistic values during the following two decades. György Lukacs, in The Destruction of Reason, has treated this point at some length. He ascribes the rising popularity throughout the 1850's of Arthur Schopenhauer, the most systematic and erudite interpreter of pessimistic thought, to “a purely bourgeois form of irrationalism.” The defeat of the revolutions of 1848 had left many Germans politically frustrated. What resulted was an “ideologically altered situation” in which Schopenhauer “suddenly grew famous and supplanted Feuerbach as the ideological leader of the (German) bourgeoisie.” Moreover, French capitalists, frightened by the workers' revolt that took place in Paris during June, 1848, helped to give pessimism its “international effect.” Indeed they knew its world despair for what it actually was, “an indirect apology” for their own economic interests.

Radio Havana? Quotations from Chairman Mao? A black liberation group pamphlet? Wrong. These are excerpts from Roman Catholic publications in Latin America. Still regarded by many as one of the bulwarks of the status quo, the Latin-American Church has undergone a startling transformation in the last five years which has moved its official thinking and portions of its elite leadership significantly to the left.

Conservatives and liberals have been living together these past two centuries in the intellectual house which Edmund Burke built. It ought to give conservatives pause that Burke's most intelligent admirer in recent times was Harold Laski. Indeed, Laski thinking to hand Burke the ultimate encomium called him the father of the welfare state. One suspects in reading Laski on the subject of Burke that Laski imagines himself to be what Burke might have become had he had the insights of Marx and the advantages of a Fabian education available to him.

On April 5, 1917, the day before Congress declared war, James Cardinal Gibbons stated in the name of the Catholic hierarchy:

In the present emergency it behooves every American citizen to do his duty and uphold the hands of the President … in the solemn obligations that confront us. The primary duty of a citizen is loyalty to country. This loyalty is exhibited by an absolute and unreserved obedience to his country.

Throughout most of the nineteenth century, British imperial policy developed from two antithetical and mutually exclusive concepts. It aimed simultaneously at extending British trade and culture under the paternal authoritarianism of crown-colony rule, and it sought the progressive realization of colonial self-government through the spread and adaptation of British institutions. The first concept sprang from the utilitarian criterion of “the greatest happiness for the greatest number,” and emphasized law rather than liberty as the great instrument of human improvement. The second derived from the utilitarian doctrine of liberty, the claim for a sphere of activity within which the individual was sovereign and free from external interference. In practice, the first was deemed appropriate for the tropical parts of Britain's mercantile empire, the second for colonies of British settlers overseas. With the outbreak of war in South Africa in 1899 these two concepts came into signal opposition, and the Fabians, intellectual heirs of utilitarianism, encountered difficulty in reconciling them. One faction, led by Ramsay MacDonald, held the issue to be one of freedom and maintained that good government was no substitute for self-government. The majority, under the influence of Sidney Webb and George Bernard Shaw, rejected the idea that Britain must educate subject peoples towards self-government and advanced an intellectual justification for autocratic control in the dependent empire. So far as the empire was concerned, Webb and Shaw aimed less at reconstructing political institutions than at making existing institutions work more effectively. In its Fabian metamorphosis, the utilitarian idea of empire thus displayed a zeal for order and centralization, and its dominant theme was greater efficiency.

Today the term political theory has two main meanings. It means the study of great thinkers who have, more or less systematically or polemically, written on matters political. This is the sense in which the term has been used in this century, down to the “behavioral revolution.” We shall adhere to that usage. Since the “behavioral revolution,” the term has also come to mean a theory, or theories, formal or axiomatic in structure, on subjects political but not traditionally dealt with by political theory in the first sense. This kind of political thought we shall call formal (political) theory.

Russia'S new naval presence in the Caribbean creates a situation somewhat like the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. This time, however, the problem confronting the United States, though less urgent, is more difficult in the sense that it is more complex. Its complexity arises mainly from the fact that, as regards the Latin Americans, Russia's main objective must be political. Its use of military force to coerce them is out of the question, and the scale of its trade with all of them except Cuba is too small to provide economic leverage. On the other hand, its naval penetration of the Caribbean could reasonably be expected to help promote Soviet prestige and political influence throughout Latin America.

To determine that the course being followed at one point in time is a road to war and that one being followed at another point is a path to peace is a hazardous undertaking. It is especially so when, as in the case presented here, the two leading figures in the successive periods of British foreign policy were both outspoken advocates of peace. Still it seems reasonable to attribute to one policy a greater affinity for those elements which contributed to the coming of a war. Since the First World War included the dimension of British participation from a very early stage, her contributions to the prerequisites of that war are worth reexamining.