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.

The article evaluates Michael Novak's theory of the common good by comparing it with Yves Simon's writings. Simon's insights reveal that Novak's argument for a “new concept” of the common good, incorporating liberal claims, falters on both theoretical and practical grounds. Theoretically, Novak's version of the common good opens the door to considerable exclusion from participation in the material benefits of society. Related to this is Novak's problematic contention that political authority should not intend the common good materially considered. Practically, his idealized version of capitalism plays down or ignores problems raised by Simon, particularly “one-way” exchanges, unequal exchange, and “illusory services”.

This article uses the relationship between George Kennan and Dean Acheson as a lens to track a classic debate over the main lines of postwar American foreign policy, especially in regard to Europe and over such related issues as negotiations with the Soviets, German unification, and the size of and necessity for American conventional and nuclear forces. It clarifies that Kennan did not play the role of powerful architect whose planning provided the blueprint and instructions for building the structure of U.S. policy in Europe. Dean Acheson proved the essential builder of the structures which provided the framework for American foreign policy for four decades. In the process, this article clarifies the nature of the personal and professional dealings of the two men over the period from the end of World War II until Acheson's death in 1971.

J. G. A. Pocock's Machiavellian Moment has become an authoritative source for our understanding of the republican tradition, the place Aristotle holds as its founder, and its adversarial relation to liberalism. In this article it is argued that Pocock exaggerates the republican character of Aristotle's thought in a way that ignores the extent to which stability and prosperity, as opposed to the kind of virtue fostered by political participation, are among the chief practical ends of the Politics. This suggests that Pocock's strict opposition between republican and liberal “paradigms” is an artificial and distorting imposition on the tradition, one more apt to limit than to broaden our understanding of the fundamental alternatives it contains.

When the Whigs define themselves as the Party of Liberty, furthermore, they define liberty in a special way. They do not mean libertinism or any other disordered form of liberty, such as a supposed “liberty to do whatever one feels like doing.” For them, a liberty undirected by reflection and choice is slavery. For them, liberty must be achieved through a self-mastery that nourishes reflection and choice. Such self-mastery is won by slowly gaining dominion over appetite, passion, ignorance, and whim. For them, the enabling agent and protector of liberty is virtue—indeed, a full quiver of virtues. (This Hemisphere of Liberty, 1992, pp. 9–10)

Liberalism and Deep Ecology are usually regarded as mutually exclusive. However, the “evolutionary” tradition of liberal thought, rooted in David Hume and Adam Smith, and including Michael Polanyi and F. A. Hayek, provides a foundation for their reconciliation. Linkage is through Hume and Smith's conception of sympathy, which today means empathy. For Hume, sympathy extends into the animal realm. Sympathy is essential for certain scientific work, and provides an foundation for both liberal and ecological ethics. Deep ecologists such as Arne Naess use the same concept. Linkage is first to biocentric ethics, and then, through examining natural beauty and, via Michael Polanyi's tacit knowledge, ecocentric ethics. The work of Hayek suggests how modern society might be harmonized with the requirements of nature. This deepens J. Baird Callicott's pioneering approach, uniting it with Lewis Hinchman's recent analysis. Liberalism's and Deep Ecology's foundations both benefit from their mutual integration.

This article examines the discussion among Russian scholars and activists concerning the principles of political liberalism in Soviet Russia during the Gorbachev era (1985–1991) and in independent Russia during the Yeltsin presidency (1991-present). After a review of the emergence of liberalism during the Gorbachev years, the analysis focuses on three models of political liberalism which have emerged in the context of Russian postcommunist state construction. Each competing model of liberalism—statist, rule of law, and social—offers a different vision of the principles of political liberalism and the strategies necessary to institutionalize liberalism as the foundation of the postcommunist polity.

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 is most striking about Michael Novak's response to my article is that he chooses for the most part to bypass the core of the argument. I compared Novak's and Simon's understandings of the common good and authority. In addition, rooted in Simon's work (which I find to be no less relevant today than forty years ago), I proceeded to critique Novak's understandings of the common good and what I find to be his unjustified conclusions about economic liberalism and the realization of the common good materially considered. (My use of Simon as a reference point is based on my judgment that he is the richest Catholic theorist on the subjects of the common good and authority.) I am trying to bring Simon's highly relevant work to bear upon the evaluation of Novak. Moreover, I try to show why Simon's criticisms of the market system are in fact more relevant now than when they were originally articulated by giving some contemporary examples. Novak elected not to engage these core points of my article, except for an outrageous statement, based on no evidence or argument (under point “f”), that most of the claims are false and are drawn from ““left-wing, anticapitalist tracts.” Again, Novak cleverly bypasses the fact that the examples I give are simply contemporary manifestations of points raised long ago by Simon.

The classical theory of totalitarianism provided unequalled insights into the nature of the Stalinist system. Its prevailing interpretation, however, proved grossly inadequate to conceptualize and explain the changes of the post-Stalinist period. Because of this, there appeared a strong tendency to reject the “totalitarian model” and, in addition, to discredit it politically, as serving the aims of the cold war. The present article tries to show that emphasizing the importance of changes did not require a wholesale dismantling of the totalitarian theory. On the contrary: the notion of totalitarianism should be preserved as an ideal-typical construct, adequately explaining the militantly ideological phase in the development of communism; the evolution of the system in its postideological phase should be explained as detotalitarization, that is, essentially, as a disintegrating process, paving the way for the so-called collapse of communism. The author analyzes the consecutive stages of the detotalitarization process in post-Stalinist Poland and thus explains the collapse of Polish communism not as a sudden, miraculous change, but as the last link in a long chain of events. He rejects the view that Polish People's Republic was “totalitarian to the end” as having no theoretical justification at all—although still being useful in the political struggle against postcommunist forces.

Jürgen Habermas levels the charge of performative contradiction as a scathing rebuke of inconsistency in his recent engagements with post-Nietzschean and Frankfurt critical theory. Focusing on this aspect of Habermas's critique of Theodor W. Adorno, the article argues against Habermas that Adorno's radical critique of reason actually pursues consistency in its radical critique of reason. It is contended that while Adorno's radical critique of reason may be total, it is not thereby hopeless and “aporetic” as critique. At root Adorno's critical theory may embody a “performative contradiction,” but this does not mean his project is necessarily incoherent or inconsistent.

This study argues that the self-described “malaise” in the study of political development theory is in part the product of the early attempt to strip judgments of value from those of fact in the interests of a more scientific comparative politics; that the resulting science has been inclined to ignore or neglect what may be the most fundamental difference between the modern and premodern worlds, namely the elimination of all religious concerns from those of politics proper (the “separation of church and state”); and that this neglect is in turn linked with the crisis in self-confidence characteristic not only of the science of comparative politics but of science or rationalism simply.

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.

In his Defence (1787–1788), John Adams rebuts French criticism of the legislative checks and balances present in most American constitutions. His aim, however, is not merely to conserve the constitutional status quo. In addition, he seeks to challenge younger Americans to reform all American constitutions by improving the tripartite legislative balance in them. That reform will be possible only on the basis of a reformed political science. Adams designed his Defence to provide his younger audience with that corrected political science, but to do so without undermining the authority and constitutional achievements of their Fathers. He does this primarily by offering an improved specimen of the kind of “reading and reasoning” that had informed the Founding generation. In it he rehabilitates certain “gloomy” authors as useful to republican political science, especially in their understanding of the passion for distinction and its place in republican government.

Although “story” and “narrative” are frequently mentioned in Voegelin's account of the structure and dynamics of human consciousness, neither he nor his commentators have closely analyzed in a direct fashion the importance of these terms to that account. This article examines their significance to Voegelin's extended analysis.

Rational choice theory is the prevailing point of view in political science today. It serves as the paradigm by which political behavior is explained and the parameters of research and publication defined. Whether it deserves its exalted status is much debated. Its advocates see it as a victory of science and reason over prejudice and irrationality, and as a major contribution to the “intellectual flourishing” of the discipline (Booth, p. 1). Some critics see it as failed science. Others fear it as successful propaganda. The works reviewed here are representative of this range of assessments. Read individually, each offers a competing image of the role rational choice theory plays in political science. Read together, they constitute a dialogue that tells the story of the contemporary discipline and its relationship to the object of its study.

Despite growing interest in the ideas of Carl Schmitt, twentieth-century Germany's premier right-wing authoritarian political thinker, most American scholars continue to downplay the centrality of Schmitt's legal thinking to his overall theory. This article attempts to overcome this lacuna by critically scrutinizing Schmitt's influential critique of liberal constitutionalism. However provocative, Schmitt's critique ultimately proves untenable because (1) it relies on an overly selective, even caricatured reading of the history of liberal jurisprudence and (2) it reproduces the most worrisome methodological claims of Schmitt's main intellectual opponent, Hans Kelsen's legal positivism.

Though indebted to the social compact for the basic features of his political thought, James Madison found the doctrine inadequate in one essential respect: its failure to provide an account of founding. Of course, this is no simple oversight in liberal political philosophy. It reflects deep misgivings about prudence—especially when understood in its “architechtonic” sense as the height of practical reason—and the inequalities that it implies. Madison addresses this problem in Federalist, Nos. 37–40, his fullest treatment of the activities of the Federal Convention. Here he defends the classical notion of prudence, describing its relationship to the modern science of politics and suggesting how it can be reconciled with modern egalitarian principles.

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.