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Reason and Political Power

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Walter E. Sandelius
Walter E. Sandelius
Affiliation:
University of Kansas
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Extract

In times of crisis and transition the common man is a political philosopher. An example of how, as part of the widespread concern with the basic problems of our politics, the learned world and the world of practical politics today find themselves close neighbors, was the Tenth International Congress of Philosophy. That this Congress, meeting in Amsterdam in August, 1948, has been described by Professor F. H. Heinemann of Oxford in an article entitled “The West in Search of a Metaphysics,” may also indicate how those who think in terms of practical political leadership for the West and those concerned with wider inquiries concerning life and nature have not yet found acceptable common answers. On the one hand at the meeting were the Thomists, or Neo-Thomists, who had already at their disposal some twenty-five Thomist periodicals and who were, in general, “the best organized contemporary philosophical school.” There were also the Marxists and socialists, who, although they had recently gained some professorships in the French and Italian universities, aroused no very great interest. A third organized element was that of Unesco, the leadership of which achieved for itself an organizational control to extend over future Congresses and their affiliated activities; yet Unesco, with its attempted promotion of a scientific humanism, failed to make progress toward either the integration of a western outlook or the building of a bridge between East and West. The speech of its director-general, Julian Huxley, advocating his well-known evolutionary humanism, “fell flat,” evincing, as Dr. Heinemann put it, that “this sort of naturalism … is totally inadequate for the solution of the spiritual crisis of our time.” It appeared also that a spiritual regeneration probably cannot be achieved by means which are largely political.

Type
Political Science and Political Power
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 45 , Issue 3 , September 1951 , pp. 703 - 715
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1951

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References

1 Hibbert Journal, Vol. 47, p. 132–137 (Jan., 1949)Google Scholar. I have depended upon Professor Heinemann'e account for much ot the material of this paragraph.

2 Arnold, Thurman W., The Folklore of Capitalism (New Haven, 1937), p. 340Google Scholar.

3 See the extract in Ebenstein, William (ed.), Man and the State (New York, 1950), pp. 299–302Google Scholar, from Schmitt, Carl, “The Concept of the ‘Political,’” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, Vol. 68 (Sept., 1927)Google Scholar. Schmitt, who became a Nazi, is considered by Ebenstein to have been “one of the two or three ablest German political scientists of the twentieth century … [whose] brilliance was surpassed only by his lack of character.”

4 (Chicago, 1946), p. 203.

5 Idem.

6 Ibid., pp. 9–10.

7 Ibid., p. 58.

8 Politics (trans. B. Jowett.) Bk. III, Ch. 13, §12.

9 Ibid., Ch. 12, §1.

10 Phillips, Bernard, “The Psychology of Irreligion,” Hibbert Journal, Vol. 46, p. 129 (Jan., 1948)Google Scholar.

11 Idem.

12 Heller, Herman, “Political Science,” Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, Vol. 12, p. 213Google Scholar.

13 Bryce, James, Studies in History and Jurisprudence (New York, 1901), Vol. 2, p. 606Google Scholar.

14 The State in Theory and Practice (New York, 1935), p. 80, note 1Google Scholar.

15 Ibid., pp. 78–80.

16 Western Political Quarterly, Vol. 2, pp. 481–513 (Dec., 1949)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Ibid., pp. 501 ff.

18 Ibid., p. 505.

19 Ibid., pp. 507 ff.

20 Ibid., p. 393.

21 Idem.

22 Yet in the next sentence Hobbes goes on to say: “But yet if we consider the same Theoremes, as delivered in the word of God, that by right commandeth all things; then are they properly called Lawes” (Leviathan [Everyman's Library], Ch. XV, p. 83).

23 Pufendorf, De Jure Naturae et Gentium, Bk. viii, Ch. 1, Sec. 2; quoted by Kelsen, loc. cit., p. 489.

24 Idem.

25 (New York, 1949).

26 Ibid., p. 25.

27 Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis. The passage is from the Prolegomena 19, as published in Scott, James Brown (ed.), Classics of International Law (Oxford, 1925), Vol. 3, p. 16Google Scholar.

28 Cahn, op. cit., p. 49.

29 See his Faith, Reason and Civilization (New York, 1944)Google Scholar. Laski maintains, in one of his more superficial arguments, that the present need for a faith points to only two alternatives—Communism or Christianity; and he says that “the regeneration of values which [Christianity in the time of its rise] … effected … is more likely to be secured in our own age by the central value of the Russian Revolution than by any alternative principle we are in a position to choose …” (p. 58); that “given the fact of victory by the United Nations, it seems to me inescapable that the Russian idea will play the same part as the principles of 1789 in reconstituting the outlook of the next age. Unless we claim that the Churches will renew their hold on men's allegiance—and there is no serious evidence for the validity of such a claim—the Russian idea seems likely to be the pivotal source from which all values will find the means of renewal …” (p. 63); and that although the dignity of the individual reflects a continuing value of the Christian idea, still Christianity remains, except for what is a secularization of the Christian religion peculiar to the United States, essentially as it has been in the past—an otherworldly view of life such that, judging by “the normal canons of proof, … the cumulative burden of some two centuries of critical examination is to leave nothing standing of the traditional edifice of Christianity” (p. 109).

30 In an address to the American Political Science Association in convention, Chicago December 28, 1948.

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