In this issue we are proud to present eight essays celebrating the lives and works of some of the most pre-eminent political philosophers who wrote in the twentieth century. These essays are authored, moreover, by some of these philosophers' most distinguished students. Their readings can and, no doubt, will be contested; it is characteristic of political philosophy that its materials – textual as well as phenomenological – are subjects of debate.

We begin with John Dewey (1859–1952) whose life spanned the second half of the nineteenth century as well as the first half of the twentieth. Concerned particularly about education, Dewey began his professional career as a secondary school teacher; but he returned to the university, after a few years, to earn his PhD. Although Dewey began his study of philosophy with Kant and continued to acknowledge his debt to Hegel, David Fott reminds us that he broke with the “idealist” model in order to embrace empirical scientific inquiry and its results – material, intellectual, social, and political.Footnote ¹ He argued that the scientific approach to the study of “things” in the world was not merely compatible with, but actually furthered human development, both social and individual, as well as democratic politics. The facts of his life reflect the comprehensive as well as progressive character of his understanding and approach. Having served as President of the American Philosophical Association, he was a recognized professional philosopher. Having served as President of the American Psychological Association, he was also recognized as an eminent social scientist. Having founded the Laboratory School at the University of Chicago, he was a renowned educator. And having served on the commission that investigated Leon Trotsky's murder in Mexico in 1938 (which concluded that there were Stalinist sources) as well as having helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, he was a democratic political activist. Not without reason the New York Times declared on his ninetieth birthday that Dewey was “America's Philosopher.”

In light of the atrocities associated with not just one, but two world wars, the other authors featured in this volume were unable to maintain Dewey's faith in progress. None of them thought that Dewey had given an adequate account of politics as they had experienced it. Like Reinhold Niebuhr, they considered Dewey to be a “child of light,” blind to the darker sides of human nature.Footnote ² They all concluded, furthermore, if in different ways and for somewhat different reasons, that there was no one “scientific” method of acquiring knowledge. Indeed, they worried that attempts to acquire and apply such a “science” uniformly to everyone and everything would extinguish human liberty.

Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and Yves R. Simon all fled from the horrors experienced during two world wars on the continent of Europe. At the urging of Waldemar Gurian, all four published some of their first and most important essays in The Review of Politics. All became U.S. citizens; all publicly argued for the superiority of American political institutions and practices to those of the European nations (Germany and France) from which they had come. But all four of these émigrés also suggested that American political life rested on an inadequate understanding of politics that needed to be more historically and philosophically informed.

As Dana Villa and Steven Smith show in their essays, Arendt and Strauss both thought it necessary to return to the ancient Greeks in order to recapture a more original, but forgotten understanding of politics and philosophy.Footnote ³ But, where her own activities on behalf of her own people led Arendt to conclude that the vita activa needed to be freed from its subordination to the vita contemplativa, which had began with Plato, Strauss tried to revive the understanding of philosophy as a way of life that Plato had depicted in Socrates. That philosophy not only began with an examination of the political opinions of Socrates' contemporaries, but it also took politics as the model of the comprehensive view the philosopher sought of the whole. According to Strauss, there was, nevertheless, an irreducible tension between the essentially open and inquiring character of the philosophical search for wisdom and the necessarily closed horizon of the city. This tension was not as fundamental, however, as the opposition between reason and revelation concerning both the character and grounds of truth and morality.

Although Strauss and Voegelin corresponded for years and made somewhat similar critiques of modern social science, Ellis Sandoz shows that Voegelin fundamentally disagreed with Strauss about the opposition between reason and revelation.Footnote ⁴ He insisted that revelation was a part of human historical experience that a philosopher had to take into account. Like Voegelin, Walter Nicgorski tells us, Yves Simon understood philosophy to be a calling or vocation. In contrast to Voegelin, however, Simon emphasized the intellectual continuity or kinship between the rigor of natural scientific investigations and Thomistic systematic philosophy. Simon did not merge reason and revelation or claim, like Voegelin, that the god of Moses, Plato, and Jesus is one. In contrast to Strauss, however, Simon did not acknowledge the existence of a fundamental tension between reason and revelation. Following Aristotle and Aquinas, he argued that there were different realms or forms of existence that had to be approached differently. A philosopher had a duty to pay attention to the political world in which he found himself; but Simon admitted, philosophers per se were often foolish about practical matters. Particularly concerned about the preservation of human liberty in the modern world, he tried to revive an appreciation for the dignity of prudence, independent of theory or science.

Neither of the two British political philosophers featured in this issue understood himself to have a quasi-religious “calling” to seek out and announce the truth, however painful and dangerous that might be. Nor did they accept the quasi-traditional metaphysics reaffirmed, in different ways, by both Voegelin and Simon. As William Galston and Timothy Fuller make clear, both Isaiah Berlin and Michael Oakeshott were emphatically modern philosophers.Footnote ⁵ Like Arendt, they were also both explicitly pluralists. The bases and the character of their pluralism were different, however, from each other's as well as from Arendt's.

Berlin was also an émigré. When he was twelve years old, his family left Russia in reaction to the rise of Communism and moved to Britain. He was educated at Oxford and considered himself to be an analytic, rather than a Continental philosopher. He claimed, indeed, that analytic philosophy had been invented in his rooms. Like John Rawls, Berlin considered “political theory” to be a branch of moral philosophy. Precisely for that reason, however, Berlin's work was much less systematic than Rawls's. Because human beings seek a variety of irreducibly incommensurable goals or goods under very different circumstances, Berlin thought that moral argument is inherently imprecise. Abstract logical structure and minute analysis may be useful in other fields of inquiry, but the subject matter of politics is unstable and mutable, and its concepts blurry-edged. Like Simon (and Aristotle), Berlin thought that the method of study should be suited to the subject, not imposed upon it. There could not and should not be any “unity of method” in philosophy. His own work was thus historical as well as analytical. In and after World War II he also became actively engaged in politics. Beginning in 1941, Galston reports, “he analyzed American politics and public opinion, first for the British Information Services in New York, and then for the Foreign Office, working out of the Embassy in Washington.” The pervasive fear he encountered among the intellectuals and artists he met in Moscow right after the war led him not only to associate with liberal anti-communists but also to develop a critique of historical determinism and materialism and defense of the liberal conception of freedom. He “believed in the power of political ideas to change the world.” Having famously distinguished “positive” from “negative” liberty in “Two Concepts of Liberty,” he argued not only that the latter was fundamental, but also that it needed to be reasserted in our time, when more “positive” notions had been used to justify oppressive policies and regimes.

Like Dewey, Oakeshott began philosophizing on a Hegelian base, but quickly moved away from it. In his first book he argued there were at least three different modes of human experience – science, history, and practice. Because each of these modes involved an abstraction from the whole, no one of them taken alone was satisfactory or satisfying. A philosopher could not adopt any of these modes, therefore, but had to try to rise above them. Precisely because each of the modes involved an abstraction from the whole, however, they could not simply be amalgamated. At most, Oakeshott suggested, one could try to put representatives of the different modes of experience and understanding in conversation with one another. In contrast to Strauss, Oakeshott did not take a part of what he considered to be “practice” or politics as the key to our experience of the whole. He also opposed the attempt to amalgamate science and politics represented by Dewey and the kind of utopian political thinking in which Rawls engaged; both represented failures to recognize the distinctive characteristics of “practice.” Because he found politics to be always intruding upon our lives and essentially transitory, like Berlin, Oakeshott emphasized the importance of maintaining what has generally become known as “negative liberty” in the face of “positive” governmental efforts to enable people to make the right “choices.”

As Paul Weithman reminds us at the beginning of his essay, John Rawls is the only author featured in this issue who is recognized to be a political philosopher (as opposed, perhaps, to a political theorist) by members of current academic departments of philosophy.Footnote ⁶ The reason is that his work is not only more analytical but also more systematic than that of the other authors. It is also, we might observe, less historical. Nevertheless, Weithman argues, in A Theory of Justice Rawls was also self-consciously attempting to respond to what has been called the crisis of modern times, even though he indicated that he had such an intention explicitly only in his later writing. In Political Liberalism Rawls observes: “The wars of this century with their extreme violence and increasing destructiveness, culminating in the manic evil of the Holocaust, raise in an acute way the question whether political relations must be governed by power and coercion alone.” Certainly there are political scientists (and economists like Joseph Schumpeter) who argue that the actual democratic process is at best regulated rivalry. In the face of the despair twentieth-century observers might feel about human nature, Rawls thus sought to show, on the basis of minimal psychological assumptions, that human beings can create and sustain a just constitutional regime. He also attempted to extend the role of reason in politics by critiquing not only utilitarianism but also moral intuitionism.

As this brief survey indicates, the authors featured in this issue differ fundamentally in their understandings of philosophy, science, politics, history, and morality. The diversity, to which a full survey of “political philosophy in the twentieth century” would no doubt add the works of Carl Schmitt, Jean Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, the recently deceased Richard Rorty, and the still living Jürgen Habermas (among others), nevertheless testifies to the resurgence and vitality of political philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century. Crises famously provoke thought; and, we see, the crisis of modern politics in the first half of the twentieth century provoked an outpouring of philosophically informed reflections on the causes as well as possible remedies. Fifty years ago Strauss observed that “it is sufficient to contrast the work of the four greatest philosophers of the last forty years – Bergson, Whitehead, Husserl, and Heidegger – with the work of Hermann Cohen in order to see how rapidly and thoroughly political philosophy has become discredited.”Footnote ⁷ That charge or lament has been reiterated more recently by Pierre Manent:

Manent admitted that he “could evoke authors like Sir Karl Popper or Raymond Aron, who have been worthy contributors to both general epistemology and political inquiry, always in a spirit of sturdy and humane citizenship. Or some modern representatives of a venerable tradition of thought like Thomism, who have offered serious reflection on moral, social and political problems within a comprehensive account of the world. But,” he concluded, “the general diagnosis seems … inescapable: no modern original philosopher was willing, or able, dialectically to weave a thorough analysis of political life within his account for the human world, or, conversely, to elaborate his account of the whole from an analysis of our political circumstances.”Footnote ⁸

To be sure, the authors featured in this issue did not present their reflections on politics as the basis for, or in the context of, a general “system” like that of Hegel, Marx, or Comte. These authors did not look solely and narrowly at political or currently pressing questions in the context of overarching understandings of the world first articulated by others, however, or merely “specialize” in political “thought.” They did not think that all aspects of human existence, much less of the world in which we live, can be accurately or truly captured by a single “method” or “system”; and they gave reasons why they had come to that conclusion. So, if political philosophy consists in “coherent reflection carried on by politically minded people, concerning the essentials of political life as such, and the attempt to establish, on the basis of such reflection, the right standards of judgment concerning political institutions and actions,” as Strauss maintained in a lecture only recently published in The Review of Politics, then there was no dearth in the late twentieth century.Footnote ⁹ There was, on the contrary, great richness and depth as well as variety in the modes of inquiry.