In 330 BCE, before a jury of 501 Athenian citizens, the statesman Demosthenes delivered what would become his most famous court speech, On the Crown. Commentators have called the speech “tragic” owing to the litigant's unusual appropriation of tropes from Attic tragedy to make his case. I offer an alternative reading of Demosthenes's speech that rests upon an alternative approach to theorizing democratic judgment. I argue that the rhetorical force and political significance of Demosthenes's metaphors, linguistic expressions and ideas depend upon the institutional setting in which they were delivered. This is because within each institutional site, a specific political practice of judgment is taking place that structures the reception of and response to ideas and images. Demosthenes's speech is in fact “anti-tragic” and reflects the democratic practice for which it was created.

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.

Almost exactly a century after August Comte inaugurated modern sociology under the flag of positivism, of progress and of mankind marching toward an era of glorious self-revelation, another sociologist directs the heavy artillery of a sweeping criticism just at that positivism and faith in progress, and at those achievements of mankind which Comte anticipated as the results of man's being himself and nothing but himself. P. A. Sorokin, an outstanding scholar, a studious analyst of social dynamics, the watchful observer of the Russian revolution and all that followed from it, presents us with an analysis of that phase of western civilization in which we have both the privilege and the anguish to exist—to live would be too pretentious a word. This analysis goes to the very heart of the crisis. And Sorokin does not mince words nor spare susceptibilities and prejudices.

The account of “democracy” presented in the writings of Alfarabi differs considerably from all other treatments of the subject, both ancient and modern. The goal of this article is to elucidate the falāsifa's view of democracy and account for its unusual character, by showing how appropriate it is to both the meaning of the term in medieval Arabic and the political situation of their own time. Questions such as internal order, war, immigration, philosophy, and their relationship to democracy as understood by the falāsifa are all duly considered. The article concludes with the suggestion that this peculiar sort of democracy nonetheless resembles modern democracy in one small but crucial respect.

Popular and prize-winning writer Norman Mailer has advanced a view of American politics and society that he calls “left conservatism.” This paper analyzes elements of Mailer's critique and describes how the parts fit together. Special attention is given to his interpretation of economic history and social psychology, his vision of moral health that he associates with the term “hipster,” and his fear of a new political mentality in the United States that he conveys through a neologism, the “wad.” The paper closes with a sketch of the ways Mailer's left conservatism both dovetails with and departs from the concerns and arguments of other contemporary American conservative thinkers.

Despite considerable recent scholarly attention to the constitutional amending process, no contemporary work on the subject has analyzed the set of seven proposed amendments that Francis Lieber published in 1865, after circulating them in Congress the previous year. These proposals are important both because of Lieber's role in the founding of American political science and because of the manner in which Lieber justified change at a time when many had come to regard the Constitution as a sacred and untouchable document. Lieber was able to strike an appropriate balance between respect for the Constitution and a willingness to adapt it to change. Unlike some theorists who followed, Lieber further advocated an organic view of society, law, and Constitution, without undermining the importance of formal processes of change. There is circumstantial evidence that Lieber's proposals may have influenced the formation of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth, albeit not the Fifteenth, Amendment. As importantly, Lieber offered important justifications for formal amendment at a time when others were advocating extraconstitutional change. Because Lieber placed his proposals within a wider philosophical context, his justification for prudent use of the amending process continues to be relevant at a time when much different issues are on the national agenda.

THE editors of the Review of Politics have asked me to do something that is indicated by the title of this informal essay. It is something that I have long had in mind. Substantially I am asked to assess after the passage of almost twenty years the thesis laid down in The Pragmatic Revolt in Politics. Ordinarily the biography of a book or of a writer's ideas had better, in good taste, be left to others. But I hope that I may be forgiven some notes on the nature of that work, because of their relevance not only to this return to the subject, but because of their relevance as well to what seems to me to be a general change in scholarly attitude toward a central problem: the place of ethics and the place of science in that study which Aristotle named by one word, Politics. It is peculiarly a pleasure to contribute this revision of a position to a journal devoted to the high cultivation of that Aristotelian conception. The distinction already achieved by the Review of Politics is in itself a witness of the changed temper of contemporary thought to a deep concern with political values.

Whether, some day, the twentieth century may claim to have inaugurated as fundamental a change in economic organization as did the monetary revolution of the sixteenth and the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century is still an open question. While in most European countries the transformation is evident, and from Spain to Scandinavia and from the British Isles to the Balkan states, it has been intensified under the impact of war economy, American public opinion still hesitates to admit any break with the past. Most people believe that expansion of governmental activities, concentration of economic power, rigidities, monopolies, public indebtedness and taxation as consequential as they are should be evaluated as accessories of an economic system which in its foundation has remained intact. In its very essence, this system is supposed to rest upon the great principles of private property, freedom of enterprise and social mobility.

Most people today mean not one but two things, when they speak of “Economic Policy”. Sometimes they mean the attainment of economic ends by means of political techniques: the “economic” concept of economic policy. Or again they mean the attainment of noneconomic, political ends by means of economic techniques: the “political” concept of economic policy. The first concept is the one the professional economist would be likely to use; and it is the only one current in economic theory. The other, the “political” concept, is that of practical politics today. It is not only war economics—whether of the Democracies or of the Nazis—that is based on a “political” economic policy but also many plans for the future such as, for instance, the Beveridge Report. For the “security” to which this and similar plans aspire, is not an economic concept but a political and social one; and it is “economic security” only because its realization is sought through economic means.

The development of nationalism during the past century and a half is increasingly recognized as one of the major phenomena calling for careful study by historians. To comprehend all the implications of this growth, the interrelations of the political, cultural and, in particular, linguistic forms of nationalism must be investigated. This is especially necessary in the case of separatist movements—the efforts of subject peoples to achieve political independence. The motives and aims of cultural and political nationalism are not always identical. The two may exist together or apart; they may develop coevally or one may precede the other. In parts of Switzerland and to some extent in Wales, cultural and linguistic distinctness and homogeneity endure without political separation. When separatist forces, both political and cultural, develop coincidentally, the question arises as to the relative strength of the two factors. In the case of the modern Irish state, now scarcely twenty years old, a common culture existed long before political statehood established itself. It was partly because of the reëmphasis early in this century upon Ireland's ancient civilization, a civilization which included a different language, that sympathy for her political aspirations was aroused. Ireland's consciousness of her Gaelic past, her golden age, survived six centuries of assault when she was deprived of political power. In the knowledge of distinctive speech of her own, in the remembrance of cultural preeminence during Europe's Dark Ages, and in the possession of tangible relics, the Irish people kept alive their sense of unity after repeated rebellions failed.

ItIs one of the ironies of English literary history that World War I, the first great modern war, coincided with what C. Day Lewis calls ‘a period of very low vitality’ for poetry. There were no Edwardian or Georgian figures to match the stature of Tennyson or Browning; the main tendencies of the age were visible not in the genius of one or two master spokesmen but in the talents of a host of minor poets. These poets, reacting to the disintegration of nineteenth-century values and conventions, turned from the contemporary reality to the peace and certainty afforded by the mellow beauties of the English countryside. In the words of their most gifted representative, Rupert Brooke, the Georgians sought ‘to forget/The lies, the truths, and pain …’; poetry became a shelter, an escape, an anodyne, a nostalgic daydream. The first Georgian Poetry anthology (1912), as Vivian de Sola Pinto remarks, ‘is a strange collection to represent English poetry at the moment when Europe was preparing for the First World War and England's stability was being rocked by the constitutional crisis and the impending disruption of the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland.’ The characteristic qualities of Georgian poetry — its blandness, its decorum, its homogeneity, its simplicity of attitude — all reflect the decline of a once powerful imaginative vision. Lyric poetry had become a mere exercise of sensibility related neither to the modern reality nor to any intellectual or imaginative vision capable of assimilating it.

The hesitancy of French Catholic intellectuals to engage in public quarrels, and speak ill of their dead, has led to the forgetting of arguments and divergences of great importance to the background of Vatican II. It has been widely assumed that France's two most influential Christian intellectuals of the mid-century, Jacques Maritain and Emmanuel Mounier, worked hand in glove to promote what one historian has called a common “French Catholic Understanding of the Modern World.”* In fact, however, letters and diaries only known after the two principals were dead, have revealed deep differences between the two men at a decisive point in the evolution of modern French intellectual life. Maritain's reservations about the left-wing Catholicism and ecumenism of his younger friends remain quite relevant in our own day. In fact Maritain had, and kept, serious reservations about the new kind of Catholicism which Mounier and his new review Esprit articulated in the early nineteen-thirties but kept them private largely because of the secret danger of a known ecclesiastical condemnation for Esprit.

It is not within the purpose of this paper to appraise the historical significance which the Council of Trent held for the consolidation of Catholic doctrine on all the points of dogmatic and sacramental theology that had been put into question by the religious innovators. Nor shall we examine the role which its measures of canonical legislation played in the great process of spiritual and disciplinary renewal which eventually determined the position of the Catholic Church in the modern world. We propose rather to turn our attention to the great goal which the Council did not reach: the restoration of the one Respublica Christiana, of the Catholic unity which prior to the sixteenth century had been the only conceivable form of Christian religious existence. To the eye of the historian, it is true, the rift in Western Christendom appears quite obviously prepared by the developments of two centuries preceding Luther's challenge. The exile of Avignon; the great schism; the constitutional unrest of the conciliar epoch of Constance and Basel; the political realism by which Renaissance popes had sought above all to consolidate their position as Italian territorial rulers; the growth of the national states and national sovereignties; the ferment of humanistic ideologies—they all were alarming and distressing symptoms of the radical disintegration of mediaeval unity.