We are living in a time when men most urgently feel the need of intellectual clarification of the social and political situation in which they stand. By no means all the great masters of social thought who have made important potential contributions to such clarification are sufficiently well known, even among social and political scientists. One of these is Max Weber who, in the English-speaking world, is known more as a sociologist of religion and a methodologist of social science than as an interpreter of the political scene. Weber's scope of interest in institutional problems, with specific reference to the modern Western world, was, however, exceedingly broad, and a substantial part of his work was centered o nthe field of political institutions, particularly in their relations to the economic order and to other aspects of the social structure.

For the purpose of this survey, a population transfer is defined as the organized removal of an ethnic group from its country of residence and its subsequent resettlement in territory under the sovereignty of its ethnic homeland in which the whole is a stateconducted operation based sometimes on international agreement between two states concerned and at other times arising from unilateral action by the state of departure, with or without international sanction.

Rousseau refers to the Jews in major and minor works, setting them alongside the Greeks and Romans as models for republican politics. Yet Rousseau's use of the Jewish example has been almost entirely neglected. I argue that this example, which for Rousseau stands between paganism and Christianity, plays a unique role in Rousseau's political thought. In particular, Judaism, as Rousseau presents it, surpasses Christianity in its this-worldly emphasis on compassion and justice, an emphasis that even the classical republics that are Rousseau's usual models for social and political well-being cannot match. It does so, moreover, without fostering the dogmatism that, along with Christian otherworldiness, has, in Rousseau's estimation, helped to spoil European politics.

In that famous passage in his De Civitate Dei which has been called the first “Mirror of Princes,” St. Augustine outlines the qualities of the good king. The passage is toolong to quote here, but certain of the qualities listed are pertinent to this discussion. He tells us that kings are happy

If they rule justly; … if they make their power the handmaid of His majesty by using it for the greatest possible extension of His worship; … if more than their own they love that kingdom in which they are not afraid to have partners; if they are slow to punish, quick to pardon; if they apply that punishment as necessary to government and the defense of the republic, and not to gratify their own enmity; … if they prefer to govern depraved desires rather than any nation whatsoever; and if they do all these things, not through ardent desire of empty glory, but through love of eternal felicity, not neglecting to offer to the true God, who is their God, for their sins the sacrifices of humility, contrition, and prayer.

“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).

This essay critically explores the efforts of John Stuart Mill and contemporary Millian scholarship to provide a utilitarian justification for a categorical principle of personal liberty. What is distinctive about Mill's argument is its pronounced emphasis upon character development as an essential constituent of happiness; the heart of the argument is that freedom of choice promotes a kind of elevated or worthy human character upon which happiness ultimately depends. Hence, society must be prevented from imposing any conventional or customary morality which would restrict individual autonomy. This case for the sovereignty of personal autonomy is infected with a number of difficulties and ambiguities. Central among these are weighty problems associated with Mill's crucial concept of individuality and its relation to human excellence or nobility of character. The refinements upon Millian doctrine introduced by his current supporters do not, and cannot, resolve its inherent ambiguities.

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.

This article integrates economic and social history, biography, and political theory as it explores how the personal ties of Marx and Engels to Ireland stamped their thought. Marx and Engels struggled to integrate Ireland into their theory of revolution, conceptualizing it as a “special case” of capitalist accumulation, a formulation partly motivated by their human sympathies for the Irish (especially strong in the case of Engels and Marx's daughters). Extended attention in this essay is thus devoted to the special place of Ireland in Marxist theory and praxis, which is pursued on two interconnected research fronts: Ireland's anomalous role in Marx's revolutionary vision and the Irish people's prominent role in the lives of Marx and Engels. While Marx's primary aim was always to capture the citadels of capitalism such as Great Britain, he and Engels concluded in the late 1860s that the thrust could not be administered frontally: they would have to strike at England's soft underbelly – Ireland. Throughout the life of the First International (1864–72), Ireland's place in Marx's strategic vision moved to the center, transforming Ireland into the “lever” of a European-wide revolution. For a half decade in the late 1860s to the early 1870s, Marx and Engels invested the Irish peasantry with this decisive geopolitical role; soon thereafter, their conception of Ireland's theoretical significance altered and dissolved alongside their fading hopes for a European socialist revolution.

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.

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.

Although the founder of the Catholic church said that “My Kingdom is not of this world,” one commentator correctly has observed of the church that “few contemporary institutions have been more intimately — and none more continuously — involved in the political order.” Never was the church's temporal dimension more graphically illustrated than in the June 1979 visit to his homeland of Pope John Paul II, the former Karol Cardinal Wojtyla, Archbishop of Cracow, Poland. Millions of people, many of them from other Communist countries, heard the first pontiff ever elected from a Soviet bloc nation repeatedly call for respect for human rights, for provision of religious liberties, and for the primacy of the individual over the state — demands that many regimes, including Communist ones, have been notably reluctant to grant. The pontiff also publicly raised the delicate issue of Polish-Soviet relations, asserting that alliances must be based on mutual respect and equality and that “there can be no just Europe without the independence of Poland marked on its map.”

How should institutions be designed so that the votes of the people reflect the general will and not the corporate will of the politically powerful? Rousseau's Social Contract provides us with two mutually exclusive solutions. The first is the more commonly discussed Spartan model where an encompassing public education system eliminates pluralism through social engineering. The second is the often overlooked Roman model of organizing the population into multiple overlapping electoral divisions and checking the power of various interest groups. Rousseau's discussion of Servius's electoral reforms anticipates Madison's arguments about controlling the effects of factions. By distinguishing these two institutional solutions, the article challenges the dominance of Sparta in readings of the Social Contract and supports the broader antiutopian turn in Rousseau scholarship.

A few years ago the word totalitarian was unknown. The popular use of the term has its origin in Mussolini's famous article on the Fascistic doctrine. Mussolini probably took the expression totalitarian from Hegel's Philosophy of Law, where the word is used to characterize the organic unity of the people. “Liberalism,” wrote Mussolini, “negates the state in the interest of the single individual. Fascism affirms the state as the true reality of the individual. It is for the only freedom which can seriously be considered—the freedom of the state and of the individual within the state—because for the Fascist everything is in the state, and outside of the state nothing legal or spiritual can exist or still less be of value. In this sense Fascism is totalitarian.”

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.

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 U.S. Supreme Court, at various times, has changed the constitutional tests it claimed to use in order to settle free exercise of religion disputes. These changes in official doctrine and the manner in which many cases have been decided have left the Supreme Court open to much criticism from legal scholars. This study differs substantially from previous work in this area. It uses a fact-attitudinal model to analyze the cases from the Warren, Burger, and Rehnquist Courts. Its findings indicate that these decisions are, generally, explainable and predictable.

A modern constitution is a man-made fundamental law, and it sets up a supreme government as agent of the people. What, however, of the commandments of the supreme God? How in face of Him can a man-made law and government be fundamental and supreme?

This is the political-theological problem, we will argue, at the deepest level of John Locke's First Treatise of Government. At that level the First Treatise chiefly undermines, although it also revises. It undermines the primacy of the biblical God, of both his providence and his law, and it also revises biblical fundamentals so as to permit a more rational and civil faith. These are the two leading contentions of this study. If they prove to be true, the First Treatise is much more important to Locke's liberalism than is commonly believed. It is the precondition for his works on toleration and Christianity, the writings setting forth the liberal religion that can abide the primacy of civil government and of “civil interests” generally. It is also, then, the precondition for the Second Treatise of Civil Government. The famous Second Treatise may be the seminal articulation of modern representative government, but the neglected First Treatise proves to be its necessary preface. So we will contend.

Although the influence of Reinhold Niebuhr's thought on political theory has been a profound one, curiously, scholars have quite often misunderstood or misinterpreted his philosophy on issues that are of central importance to his political vision. Specifically, Niebuhr's program for ethical and political action is often described as one of “unrestricted” consequentialism, in which ethical decision making is by necessity reduced to a process where the ends justify the means. Despite the fact that Niebuhr's theory of ethics clearly called for an examination of the likely consequences of one's actions, it should nevertheless not be labeled in this manner.

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.

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.