Collective memory is an important source of social stability, allowing human beings and political communities to integrate new experiences into existing narrative frameworks. In addition to sustaining individual and group identities, remembrance can also maintain cycles of hatred. Building on Arendt's political theory, I present an alternative interpretation of memory as a resource for political change following historical ruptures. This constructive reading focuses on the ability of communities to create new futures out of the shattered pieces of the past. For Arendt, the experience of totalitarianism was a caesura that made nationalist histories, and the nation-state that came with these interpretations of the past, untenable. Following such breaks, communities must reconstruct the past into new narratives. Arendt's unexpected early support for European integration—despite its supranational, technocratic, and economistic qualities—is an example of how memory can function as a resource for political transformation in the aftermath of historical ruptures.

Herodotus, who has been rightly called the Father of Western history, tells us in the first sentence of the Persian Wars that the purpose of his enterprise is to preserve that which owes its existence to men (ta genomena ex anthrôpôn), lest it be obliterated by time, and to bestow upon the glorious, wondrous deeds of Greeks and Barbarians sufficient praise to assure their remembrance by posterity and thus make their glory shine through the centuries.

Through a critical analysis of the positions of Rawls and Habermas, the article argues against the proviso that religious language be “translated” into an allegedly neutral vocabulary as a condition for full inclusion within public political reasoning. Defending and expanding the analysis of Maeve Cooke, it maintains that both Habermas and Rawls mischaracterize the nature of religious reasons in relation to reasons alleged to be “freestanding,” “secular,” or “postmetaphysical.” Reflection on the origins of religious discourse and the component thought to be retained when such discourse is “translated” demonstrates the untenability of a sharp distinction between “rational” and “religious” discourse on matters pertaining to morality. The article nonetheless affirms the need for common acceptance of the justificatory language of coercive political policies, but contends that this language is best conceived as a historically evolving wide (not universal) agreement, and as a confluence of various types of agreement.

The political ideal of neutrality toward conceptions of the good is unsustainable at the extremely abstract level proposed by some liberal theorists. Neutrality is nonetheless a valuable political ideal. One of the many ways that government can go wrong is to take a position on some question that it would, all things considered, be better for it to abstain from deciding. The classic example is the question of which (if any) religion is true. The idea of neutrality holds that government ought to avoid this pathology.

Most contemporary political theorists who have interpreted Sophocles' Antigone have focused on the fearsome clash between Antigone and Creon. The relationship between Antigone and her weaker, more cautious sister Ismene has not garnered similar attention. This essay addresses this gap by revisiting the tantalizing possibility that Ismene played a more significant role in resisting Creon than has often been assumed. The essay shifts the analysis of Antigone, first, by illuminating the complex and fraught relationship between two women and emphasizing the political and legal challenges that they face together as women. Second, the essay shifts focus from vertical power relations—that is, between the individual and government—to horizontal power relations between disempowered outsiders. On this reading, Antigone reveals less about the downfall of a character than it does about the political power of the weak and disadvantaged.

The history of world politics of the half century before 1914 is full of nationalist wars, imperialist conflicts, and the diplomacy of the armed peace. To the less spectacular developments of internationalism so little attention is usually paid that the League of Nations almost seems to emerge full-grown from the head of Woodrow Wilson. It is true that the dominant trend in the relations between the sovereign states was anything but pacific, and the peoples were increasingly swayed by the emotion of aggressive nationalism. At the same time the world was becoming more interdependent economically and culturally, and there was a quiet but clearly perceptible growth of international-mindedness. A significant expression of this development was the movement of ideas in the eighteen-seventies which led to the establishment of two important law societies, the Institute of International Law and the International Law Association. The story of their origins is an interesting chapter in the history of international law and throws light as well upon its relationships with the organized peace movement.

In the three centuries since the publication of the Two Treatises, a trail set down by Locke, although scarcely concealed, has gone unremarked—as has its final destination. If we miss this trail, we miss the work's coherence. If we follow this trail, we find a compelling, even shocking, case against Revelation as an independent source of authority. And we find a theory of property so powerful—certainly in Locke's own estimation—it compels the reconstitution of the relation between children and parents, wives and husbands, servants and masters, persons and polities, and ultimately between man and God. Indeed, Locke's story of the right of property is also the story of man's coming into his own, his coming into his own mind, freed from the irrational claims of Revelation. Thus, Locke's theory of property is nothing less than a story of man's Enlightenment.

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Orientalists such as Schlegel and Müller sought to broaden narrow European scholarly horizons by comparing ancient Indian ideas with those of classical Greece and Rome and modern Europe, and thus to transform the human sciences. These aims are similar to contemporary comparative political theory's concerns to remedy the Eurocentrism of the field of political theory and to identify valuable ideas in non-Western sources. These similarities suggest that we ought to revisit our understanding of Orientalism, reconsider how and when epistemological appropriation has political consequences, and recognize the limits of text-based approaches to political theory.

Virtually all scholars interpret Aristotle to exclude women from politics. I will argue that Aristotle does not directly investigate this question, and that his text does not require such an interpretation. First, the article will show that scholars have overlooked the basic problem for interpreters of Aristotle, and that they have prematurely foreclosed counterinterpretation of the text. Second, it will show that the text is open to this particular counterinterpretation: very guardedly, Aristotle implies reasons for including women in politics.

InOurDay, the concept of progress has fallen into disfavor in philosophical and scientific circles, although most people ordinarily seem to take it for granted, in an unanalyzed fashion. There is some reason for its rejection by the more thoughtful; in most of its expressions it was accepted in what now seems rather simplistic terms with regard to its nature and certainty. Without some idea of progress, however, an age dominated by radical change may lack any standard by which to evaluate its condition and tendencies. Furthermore, the idea of progress, and of a meaningful history, was not always presented in oversimplified terms. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, a singular figure in the French revolutionary tradition, developed in the middle of the last century a complex and flexible thought about progress in history, and attention to his now little-known ideas may help us save the concept for political analysis and practice.

This essay examines the evolution from 1785 to 1800 of Madison's understanding of the proper role of public opinion in the American political system. It provides an insight into Madison's transformation from the leading architect of the Constitution during the 1780s to the opposition leader of the Jeffersonian party during the 1790s. The essay challenges the contention that Madison's writings on public opinion establish his support for using governmental institutions and statesmanship to improve the souls of the citizenry and to develop a common character among them. Instead, it is argued, Madison defended the sovereignty of public opinion as a means for citizens to influence and monitor their representatives’ actions in an extended republic where these tasks were at once difficult and imperative. In the course of this defense, Madison contributed to a developing libertarian tradition of political thought in America based upon the broad protection of freedom of speech and the belief that political truths best emerge from the free flow of ideas.

COMMENTATORS puzzling over the question of whether the Brazilian insurrection of March-April, 1964, was a revolution or simply a coup d'état have speculated on the role of a faintly mysterious civilian organization called IPES (Instituto de Pesquisas Estudos Sociais) in the rebellion. IPES is one of a large number of organized civilian groups now covering all of Latin America except for Haiti and Cuba, groups which can be generically termed Neoliberal. The Brazilian rebellion is undoubtedly the greatest success the Neoliberals have had so far in their four or five years of existence (only three of the more than forty Neoliberal organizations were founded before 1959), and the only occasion on which they have been directly (though not uniquely) responsible for the overthrow of an incumbent regime. What the future role of IPES and similar groups will be in Brazil, and whether the transformation of the country will be a truly revolutionary one, remains to be seen, but the power mustered by the Neoliberals in half a decade is remarkable, and a factor which will have to be dealt with in the future.

Courts in both the United States and Canada have been forced to consider the constitutionality of laws disenfranchising convicted offenders. Despite similar legal traditions, courts in the two countries have reached diametrically opposed results, with the U.S. Supreme Court upholding broad state power to disenfranchise offenders and Canadian courts rejecting progressively less severe restrictions on offenders' right to vote. Using these decisions as its focus, this article analyzes contemporary theories of judicial review and argues that neither interpretive nor noninterpretive theories of review capture the complex relationship between legal positivism and moral principle that is at the core of liberal constitutionalism. Consequently, neither the Canadian nor American decisions have fully grappled with the normative principles underlying criminal disenfranchisement. The paper further argues that there is a principled defense of criminal disenfranchisement that is grounded in the relationship among citizenship, civic virtue, and punishment.

Neither cultural conversion to Western liberalism nor resort to local traditions such as Confucianism adequately deals with the hybrid nature of democratization in a postcolonial context. With its assortment of Chinese, Japanese, American, and Taiwanese hegemonic legacies, Taiwan offers a case in point. Its version of democratic politics operates across three contending normative domains: liberal political institutions, Confucian rationales for power, and Taiwanese nativist/nationalist sensibilities. Some may despair at this “distortion” of the (Western) liberal democratic ideal. We suggest, alternatively, that the contentious and unstable nature of liberal politics in Taiwan may render its polity more open-ended and organic, with simultaneous potential for both authoritarianism and democratization.

This article explores Mahatma Gandhi's contributions towards the evolution of the modern Indian political canon. Beginning with the Arthasastra, classical India had a political canon of its own. It flourished for over a millennium, but it suffered near extinction with the introduction in the nineteenth century of the Western political canon by the colonial state. Gandhi in the twentieth century intervened and challenged the dominance of the Western canon. He updated the old canon by deleting what was obsolete in it, preserving what was viable, and adding to it what was new and modern.

Three powerful ideologies emerging in the first half of the nineteenth century combined to destroy the Old Order in Western Europe and shape its future: liberalism, nationalism and socialism. Little is known about the genesis of the three words that served to designate these ideologies. The most casual research will reveal astonishing contradictions among the recognized authorities, the lexicographers, not to speak of some glaring mistakes that appear in the writings of notable historians. For such shortcomings there is no lack of excuse. Indeed, in order to produce a sound and indisputable history of these three master words, it is necessary to sift so much material—no less than the whole printed output of the age—that the task appears quite hopeless. The present essay, therefore, is clearly open to criticism and revision; it has no other purpose than to suggest some guidelines of approach and to patch together some of the scraps of evidence now available. All this, let it be well understood, being confined to the French language and scene. Similar probes in the English or German soil would undoubtedly reveal different patterns.

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.

The question was raised at the end of World War II as to whether or not international relations could stand as a separate field of study. Views were expressed by scholars and teachers in history and political science to the effect that in substance there was nothing peculiar to the subject matter of international relations which did not fall under other separate fields of social studies. At some universities and colleges there were dissenters to this prevailing viewpoint. Their particular philosophy manifested itself in attempts to create and establish integrated curricula under academic committees or departments dedicated to the broad generalized study of die subject matter of the field. It is still too early to pass judgment with any finality on the merits of these two points of view, the one viewing international relations as a mere duplication of the subject matter of many fields; the odier insisting that diere must be an ordering and integrative approach to die field. No serious student would presume to claim that die study of international relations had arrived at die stage of an independent academic discipline. However, there have been three significant developments within no more than a single generation which illuminate certain aspects of this problem. First we have witnessed the evolution and development of a point of focus or core in the field. Secondly, diere have been die first faint and feeble beginnings of attempts to create a mediodology appropriate for the field, or at least to determine those related mediodologies in the social sciences whose methods and techniques could most usefully be appropriated for the study of persistent international issues. Thirdly, inventories have been drawn up by individual scholars, universities and institutes, of topics and concrete projects which would best serve in the development of general principles in the field and the validation of them dirough systematic inquiry.

The First World War is sometimes credited with the dissolution of the well-ordered universe of the nineteenth century. In fact, by 1914 there was very little left to destroy, for most of the essential work had already been accomplished. The aftermath of the war merely helped to make the collapse of order and stability more visible. But the post-1918 atmosphere of gloom, later crystallized in the “Lost Generation” and in the escapist movements of the twenties, gave the impression that the war had been responsible for the moral and intellectual Zusammenbruch of the period. The feeling of decay was everywhere; the old values, the former certainties and criteria had vanished, leaving an impression of emptiness behind. The old order had crumbled, without dignity, “not with a bang but with a whimper,” as T. S. Eliot put it.

According to Hegel, universal history is the realization of the Idea of Reason in a succession of National Spirits. These are manifested in the deeds of heroes, or world-historical individuals, such as Alexander the Great, Caesar, and Napoleon. However, the Idea of Reason does not work itself out in history in a manner which would seem reasonable on the surface. It is not actualized in this or that of its stages as a consequence of men consciously adopting it as their ideal and striving to translate it into reality through their mode of life and conduct. It is not, as it were, through the imitation of Reason that Reason is realized in history. How, then, does this take place?

Hegel's answer to this question is contained in his doctrine of the Cunning of Reason. Briefly, he holds that history fulfills its ulterior rational designs in an indirect and sly manner. It does so by calling into play the irrational element in human nature, the passions. So Hegel writes: “Two elements, therefore, enter into our investigation: first, the Idea, secondly, the complex of human passions; the one the warp, the other the woof of the vast tapestry of world history.” By “passion” he means those all-consuming emotions of the individual person which are self-regarding in nature. In discussing the question, he writes: “I mean here nothing more than human activity resulting from private interest, from special or, if you will, self-seeking designs—with this qualification: that the whole energy of will and character is devoted to the attainment of one aim and that other interests or possible aims, indeed everything else, is sacrificed to this aim.”