John Rawls expounds a new liberal political theory that supposedly differs from traditional varieties in the narrowness of its scope and the distinctive solution it offers to the problem of legitimacy. The contrast between Rawls's “political liberalism” and “ethical liberalism” is said to emerge strikingly in the approach to political education each entails. But the differences Rawls stresses between the two liberalisms are illusory, and the real implications of his theory for political education clearly show this. However, Rawls does offer a powerful case for a liberal political theory, albeit of a traditional kind, and its educational agenda can be endorsed as a corrective to political domination and manipulation, even though the agenda must be pursued at the cost of some ethical diversity.

Liberalism can be understood in considerable part as a reaction against the religious wars of Europe from the end of the Middle Ages through the early modern period. Unfortunately, liberalism itself was so profoundly shaped by the conditions of its birth that it became a perpetuator of the same narrow fanaticism that fueled the fires of the Spanish Inquisition and burned Servetus in Calvin's Geneva. Eamonn Callan's article, “Political Liberalism and Political Education,” is a forceful reminder that liberalism is still a carrier of the same virus of fanaticism that insisted on celebrating masses of Reason in Notre Dame de Paris while setting up guillotines to behead the members of religious orders who refused to disband. That is the same virus of fanaticism that manifested itself in the claim to grasp scientifically the laws of history, a claim that led to the liberation of man via Gulag. Oh, I know, Gulag and the guillotine are out of fashion with rationalistic liberators at the moment. Nevertheless, it is the coercive power of the modern sovereign state produced by the same rationalism that Callan wants to use to force us all to be free.

From the perspective of liberalism as the religion of immanent divinity, the Reason of rationalism, Callan sees that John Rawls, in Political Liberalism, is a backslider, objectively a traitor to liberalism, even if not subjectively so. In Political Liberalism Rawls tried to move further away from his roots in rationalistic dogmatism and further toward his roots in pragmatism. Callan shows there is no tenable halfway house of the kind Rawls imagines.

Political Liberalism was motivated by Rawls's belief that A Theory of Justice inadequately treated the problem of stability. Theory of Justice grounded justice in a comprehensive doctrine, ethical liberalism. In a society wherein citizens hold a variety of reasonable comprehensive doctrines, such a theory of justice is unstable. Political Liberalism seeks a free-standing political theory compatible with many reasonable comprehensive doctrines.

Reasonableness involves reciprocity which in turn requires the acceptance of the burdens of judgment. We cannot respect other citizens if we regard them or their comprehensive doctrines as pernicious or stupid. While we may continue to accept our own comprehensive doctrine, reciprocity and tolerance require that we recognize that other doctrines and those who hold them are reasonable.

Callan claims that Rawls's project fails. Ethical liberalism views autonomy as essential to a good life. However, if the burdens of judgment are a prerequisite for reciprocity, political liberalism must also value autonomy, if not as an essential part of a good life, then as a public good. Any view of political socialization robust enough to secure a recognition of the burdens of judgment must also produce habits of mind tantamount to autonomy. If so, political liberalism collapses into ethical liberalism. Their implications for political socialization are indistinguishable. Many comprehensive doctrines, paradigmatically religious ones, will be weakened by these requirements for political socialization.

Callan's argument points to a tension in liberal views of education. A liberalism that promotes a thick liberal culture will appear intolerant to many with religious commitments.

What are the virtues that befit citizens of a liberal democracy? What moral constraints should the state respect in its sponsorship of political education? In “Political Liberalism and Political Education” I gave a partial answer to the first question; apart from a solitary footnote, I ignored the second. Yet some of my Rawls-inspired remarks about the connection between the burdens of judgment and toleration blurred the distinction between the two questions. That is unfortunate because the distinction matters.

Suppose we answer the first question correctly. We might still be tempted to pursue the ends of political education with Jacobin ferocity, laying waste to all that impedes our righteous cause. That course is subject to overwhelming moral criticism. Liberals must care about freedom of conscience and not just about the freedom of the virtuous liberal conscience. Alternatively, a correct answer to the second question might coincide with a certain blindness to the importance of the first or with a tendency to confound what is properly tolerated in a liberal democracy with what is rightly deemed virtuous. Liberals cannot afford to be indifferent to the virtues that are distinctive of the liberal conscience or to neglect the educational practices that would nourish them. If a self-defeating cultural aggressiveness is the vice of some who are fixated by the first question, an equally destructive cultural complacency is the besetting sin of those who take the second question seriously without having a credible answer to the first.

Fifty years after the Nuremberg tribunals, Germany is once again caught up in a series of controversial trials involving former dictators. This time, officials of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) sit in the docks. Some observers have criticized these proceedings, maintaining that they will result in the imposition of an arbitrary form of “victor's justice.” Others have claimed, in contrast, that the cumbersome German Rechtsstaat (“state under the law”) will prove incapable of responding to public demands for retribution. In this article, the author maintains that Germany's courts have not been at a loss in answering these complaints. By grounding their judgments in preexisting East German law, the courts have managed to bring some of the GDR's former leaders to justice while at the same time guaranteeing most defendants the full protection of the rule of law. In the process, the courts have even conveyed an important message about the terms under which both German populations will be brought back together again.

It is argued that, in contrast to traditional interpretations, Morgenthau's theory of international politics is primarily concerned with the normative, and that, in contrast to revisionist accounts, the moral theory he generates is rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition of moral thought. Morgenthau adopts an Augustinian, rather than Hobbesian-Machiavellian, moral framework, reconciling cosmopolitan principles with a recalcitrant reality by representing their relationship as a dialectical tension. This leads him to develop a practical morality which emphasizes the continued application of cosmopolitan imperatives to action, mitigated by a consequentialist orientation which demands that they be applied cautiously and always adapted to circumstances. This generates a political morality which reconciles the imperatives of morality and national survival by asserting that, while the national interest must be protected, it must always be subjected to strict moral limitations. It is therefore concluded that his approach ultimately culminates in a traditional, Judeo-Christian, nonperfectionist ethic.

In the 1960s, the New Left sought to transform American society by mobilizing the most oppressed and excluded groups—blacks, the poor, unemployed youths. This article explores both the causes and consequences of the powerful attraction that the American New Left felt for the oppressed and downtrodden. The political thought and actions of the New Left cannot be reduced to psychological motives but must instead be rooted in the New Left's commitment to radical egalitarian social relations and values. While there is much that can be admired in the New Left's deep and sincere concern for the disadvantaged, the New Left's romance with the oppressed also had darker, illiberal consequences that led many in the New Left to excuse and justify the very sort of oppression they had originally sought to oppose.