The unexpected death of former Chilean President Eduardo Frei Montalva in Santiago on 21 January 1982 had suddenly deprived his country and the international Christian Democratic movement of one of its firmest pillars – a force for justice, decency and order in Latin America and the world. At a time when the very profession of politics has fallen into a sort of fashionable disrepute throughout the democtatic world, and the notions of compromis, conciliation, and community seem less attraactive than ideological purification and a post-“political” order, men like Frei serve to remind us that there are alternatives, if we would but pursue them.

Inequality is still with us. For all of the talk (and worry) about the appeal of egalitarianism in modern politics, the benefits which derive from living together in organized society continue to be distributed in highly unequal ways. The reports of the death of privilege are greatly exaggerated. Some people live in opulence while others live in squalor. From birth some have secure life prospects while others survive, much less flourish, against enormous odds. Some people live comfortably well into old age, while others suffer and die from curable diseases in childhood or youth. In certain respects and in certain societies there no doubt has been some progress toward more equality, but in numerous other respects inequality persists. Indeed, it has grown.

There were and still are several ways of meeting — getting acquainted with, knowing — the philosopher Jacques Maritain, the centenary of whose birth is this year. We could consult people who knew him, heard him lecture and hobnobbed with him; we could read his voluminous letters to and from Yves Simon, letters to which we hope the public will soon have access; and we might ask him what he meant by “Christian philosophy,” a key concept in many of his sixty published books.

One of the marks of any generation's scholarship is its desire to examine the ideas of important historical figures in the light of contemporary concepts and concerns. One of the marks of a truly significant historical figure is his or her ability to inform and stimulate successive generations as each grapples with the salient issues of its own times. This scholarly dialectic has its dangers and its satisfactions. One danger lies in the temptation to carve one's own interpretation of historical writings immutably into the concrete issues of one's own times, dismissing as secondary or historically idiosyncratic, those ideas which do not answer the needs or fit the intellectual categories of that time. A second danger is that of early obsolescence. The satisfaction of the scholarly dialectic, on the other hand, lies in the discovery of solid foundations in the past for the concerns of the present. This is particularly important when the historical figure in question is one of the nation's Founders, for here the solid foundation supports not only a historical interpretation but can legitimate constitutional interpretation as well.

A muddy pool, it is said, can pretend to any depth, an observation applicable to much of the revisionist liberalism now widespread in the academy. Unable for ideological or prudential reasons to accept, say, a conservative, classically liberal, or Marxist critique of modern society, but increasingly uncomfortable with the failure, as it is viewed, of bourgeois democracy, neoliberal system-builders have sought a synthesis of the “best” elements of socialist economics (yielding equality) and market relations (efficiency) within a “genuinely” democratic framework. The publication of Charles E. Lindblom's Politics and Markets is as an important auspice of this trend. Recipient of the American Political Science Association's most prestigious book award and laudatory comment in the journals of opinion, the volume has also sparked reaction in business circles, as in the Mobil Oil advertisement which took issue with Lindblom's analysis of big business' “privileged position” in the governance of the world's polyarchies (i.e., the “crippled” democracies of North America, Western Europe, Japan and related systems).

A timeless issue in the history of political thought is the relation of theory and practice. From Plato to the present, it has preoccupied political philosophers and statesmen. In the discourse, an uneasy truce has prevailed between those who view theory as a handmaiden of practice and those who maintain that the twain shall never meet. Their differences are illustrated by discussion of the classical distinction questioning whether theory and practice should be paired at all. If theory merely finds expression and can realize itself only through application in practice, it becomes something less than theory conceived of as the quest for truth.

The 1930's posed difficult moral problems for European Catholics. First came Mussolini's questionable adventure in belated colonialism in Ethiopia. Then the war in Spain suddenly, and with piercing sharpness, posed the moral problems of civil war. For the most influential Catholic thinker of his time, Jacques Maritain, the war in Spain was a challenging difficulty. Though Maritain openly refused his allegiance to Franco, and thereby became a scandal to Catholics horrified by the Spanish republic's attacks on the official Church, his reflections on Spain gave impetus to a current of thought in Catholic circles that culminated in the declaration of the Second Vatican Council on the relations between church and state. Hence, as so often happens, a time of confusion and fraternal strife was also a time of clarification, and a time of despair broadened into a time of hope.

Methodological controversy and self-awareness have been endemic in international relations. Yet it is curious how little genuine debate this has engendered, if we understand by “debate” an arena in which arguments are joined rather than one in which assertions are juxtaposed. One has instead the sense of a number of separate guilds, each of which proceeds on the basis of its own indigenous premises, conscious of the work of other groups only as caricature. The various guilds, or intellectual groups, may be distinguished on the basis of their central notions as to the most important data in the field, the appropriate manner of investigating that data, and the character of the knowledge which can result. Occasionally exercises in critique or defense, ostensibly directed outward, are undertaken, but the effect of these sallies remains internal to the group of origin. One finds little evidence of essential change in major premises brought about in response to external criticism.

Since Pearl Harbor, American foreign policy during the Harding-Coolidge-Hoover years has receivedalargely negative appraisal from historians. In the aftermath of World War II, the adherents of Wilsonian internationalism dominated the writing of American diplomatic history. The crux of their indictment of the Republican administrations of the twenties was that this country's refusal to participate in collective-security arrangements for upholding the peace was responsible for the breakdown of international order in the years that followed. If the United States had joined the League of Nations, or at the minimum cooperated with the peace-loving nations, Britain, France, and, until the illusions of the wartime alliance collapsed, the Soviet Union, against would-be or actual aggressors, the Second World War could have been avoided. Although this view has continued to have its champions, the hardening of Cold War tensions —and the accompanying disillusionment with the efficacy of the United Nations — spurred a major counterattack upon what George F. Kennan has termed the “legalistic-moralistic approach to international problems.” With the emergence of the so-called realist school came a different—though no more positive—evaluation of the role played by the United States during the age of normalcy.

The challenge of fascism led Italy's most distinguished philosopher, Benedetto Croce, to focus on the condition of the philosophical foundations of liberalism. Partly as a result, Croce became a central figure in the liberal opposition to fascism, and when, in the early 1940's, it became possible to envision the reconstruction of a liberal political order in Italy, he had no choice but to play a major role, even though he was seventy-seven years old in 1943. Largely because of Croce's direct involvement, the ensuing debate over political priorities brought to the surface, to an unusual degree, major questions about the intellectual underpinnings of liberalism. Croce had been seeking to bring liberal theory up to date, with some promising results, but his immediate practical preoccupations during the 1940's diluted the force of his argument, so the contribution which he could have made to a modern recasting of liberalism, both for Italy and for modern culture in general, was not appreciated. Instead, Croce's stance contributed to tensions that quickly caused Italian liberalism to fragment — and to shrink — and of course the resulting weakness has been crucial to postwar Italian history. On the European level as well, the new liberalism he had in mind never fully coalesced, and thus in part, liberalism has been widely considered passé among European intellectuals.

In recent times, the issues surrounding crime and punishment have seldom been discussed from the vantage point of political philosophy. Instead, they have tended to become the province of lawyers, psychologists, and specialists in ethics or the philosophy of language. Whatever the merits of their respective contributions may be, such writers usually have assumed that the basic questions of political legitimacy and the state's authority to enforce criminal law have been settled. In effect, they ask: given a state which already possesses a legitimate system of criminal justice, whom should the state punish (if it does at all), why, and under what circumstances?

In Knowledge and Politics Roberto Mangabeira Unger offers an extended critique of liberalism. He formulates a conception of liberalism as a framework of ideas that is embodied in particular institutions and practices, constituting a way of life and a form of consciousness. He evaluates this liberal framework, its crystallization in the seventeenth century, its powerful but unacknowledged hold over developed Western societies, its fragmentation into specialized perspectives, its dilemmas of thought and practice, and the possible emergence of an alternative framework. Our reading of Knowledge and Politics initially led us both to a provisional agreement with Unger and to the realization that if his project is successful he has made a contribution of great importance to political theory. Our hesitation in fully endorsing his theory was due to this characteristic of Knowledge and Politics: while Unger often refers to individual liberal thinkers for purposes of illustration, he does not systematically apply his critique to any theorist. He realizes that he might be accused of erecting and toppling a “straw man,” for he states that “it might be objected that the view I discuss is a view nobody has ever held.” He acknowledges that the liberal framework he constructs is not intended to fit exactly the thought of particular liberal theorists, that his references to philosophers such as Hobbes, Locke and Hume “are designed to illustrate rather than to prove their adherence to the doctrines that are the subject of the critique. In this sense, the critical argument remains hypothetical.”

Everyone knows that the art of political rhetoric has declined drastically in the modern world. Observers of the decline often measure and deplore it, but few pause to reflect that one of the reasons for the decline may be the acceptance of certain liberal principles which entail limits to the scope and power of political speech. Even such a clear-sighted observer of the interplay of language and politics as George Orwell argued that the simplification and purification of language went hand in hand with the liberalization of politics. Orwell was not mistaken when he coupled perverted speech with totalitarian politics. But it is dangerous to assume that excellent political speech is at home in liberal regimes, or that liberal speech can be as psychologically satisfactory as illiberal speech. Orwell recognized this point when he noticed in his review of Hitler's Mein Kampf that the liberal “hedonistic attitude to life” fails to satisfy some of the irrepressible longings of the human soul, and leaves room for the kind of appeal made by Hitler. There is an inherent weakness in liberal rhetoric which cuts it off from some of the sources of political conviction and community.

As equality has come to dominate the postliberal era, so virtue was earlier supplanted by liberty. However tentatively, events in many countries suggest a serious erosion in the consensus for equality. Critics of the egalitarian mind-set are achieving a new respectability. Conservative recommendations are hardly uniformly accepted, but they are now heard and, increasingly, countered on practical rather than theoretical grounds. Whether this marks a real revolution, it is at least temporarily popular to question equality in public.

To speak of the self is to fix one's attention inward; to speak of social and political things is to direct one's attention outward toward those with whom our life is mysteriously and often involuntarily bound. What do “they,” those fellow citizens, want from us? Shall we approach them openly, guardedly, or perhaps not at all? Shall we look away, turn inward and thus fulfill ourselves? What, precisely, is involved in responding to the others?

The question of national identity has been a central theme in Mexican thought since the Revolution of 1910. The writings of Octavio Paz, one of Mexico's most prominent literary figures, are an important and provocative locus for this question. The contribution of Paz to an analysis of Mexican identity must be seen in the broader context of an intellectual revolution in Mexico. This began in the late 1920's and was directed against the prevailing philosophical romanticism represented by Antonio Caso and Jose Vasconcelos. This was, in part, a protest against the anti-intellectualism inherent in an “aesthetic-intuitive” approach of these writers. But it was also the demand for a philosophical perspective more relevant to an emerging Mexican nationalism already being articulated in literature and art. The writings of the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset were of crucial importance in influencing Mexican philosophy towards realism. The key concept taken from Ortega was that of “historical perspectivism”: the view that reality cannot be grasped independently of the point of view from which it is being observed. Perspectives do not distort reality; they constitute it. Philosophy, then, is changed from something abstract and eternal to something concrete and historical. Ortega's historical perspectivism became the inspiration for Mexican thinkers who wished to develop a national philosophy and a concept of “Mexicanidad.”

Although born a slave and held in bondage until past his twenty-first birthday, Blanche K. Bruce escaped the worst cruelties of the Peculiar Institutions. He was born in a slave cabin near Farmville, the county seat of Prince Edward County, Virginia, on 1 March 1841. Youngest of eleven children born to his slave mother Polly, Bruce was an octoroon or quadroon, with light skin and Caucasian features; his father's name and race, however, are apparently unknown.

Despite the high seriousness and obviously increasing importance of international politics in our time, something recognizable as a philosophy of the subject, in the view of some scholars, has not yet succeeded in emerging from the demise of “banal” positivism. This lamentable and barely explicable state of affairs has led several philosophically inclined scholars to urge the search for a philosophy of international relations. The form, scope and content of the proposed philosophy have received less attention; the philosophers in question have been content to limit their philosophical inquiry to a species of historical-philosophical archaeology consisting of, for example, the uncovering of Kant's conception of philosophical reason as it relates to international relations or, the recovery of “the just war for classical theory” or, the discovery tout court of a conception of “justice” for international relations. Without putting such indispensable efforts at risk or preempting the results of such scholarship, I see two obstacles to their success. First, there has been little or no comparable effort directed toward indicating, except in highly schematic form, what any such philosophy might consist in and, secondly, it is still unclear what relationship there could be between any such proposed philosophy and alternative conceptions of international relations such as empirical systems theory.

The Catholic political tradition is at the very center of contemporary Italian politics, but the process by which that tradition came into existence and how it evolved remains obscure and often is subjected to extremely simplistic explanations. Modern Catholic political theory began to take shape during the period of the French Revolution. However, it was the Risorgimento that decisively influenced the political consciousness of Italy's Catholics. The unification of the country in 1860 came about largely at the Church's expense. Pius IX, once the darling of Catholic liberals, responded to the Risorgimento with a fusillade of counterrevolutionary invective in Sillabo degli errori del nostro tempo (8 December 1864), still the most notorious example of anguished Catholic imprecations in the post-Risorgimento period. The Church, never comfortable in the post-1789 world, now made unforgettably clear her utter and irrevocable rejection of that world. Her role as the aggressive critic of modernity hardened into one of the outstanding conventions of nineteenthcentury European culture.

According to Publius (the nom de plume of The Federalist's authors), a primary task of the Convention was to create an executive of sufficient energy and independence. As he says in Federalist, No. 70: “There is an idea, which is not without its advocates, that a vigorous executive is inconsistent with the genius of republican government. The enlightened well-wishers to this species of government must at least hope that the supposition is destitute of foundation.” The president must be able to administer the government and defend the nation but he must do so without destroying or being destroyed by constitutional limitations or the political independence of Congress.