In April 1929 the trustees of the University of Chicago, in the midst of an unprecedented boom on the stock exchange, chose Robert Maynard Hutchins, the thirty-year-old dean of the Yale Law School, to be the fifth president. During the twenty-two years that followed, Hutchins made an impression upon the organization and the life of the young university of a kind such as his sponsors for the office and the newspaper public, which enjoyed the spectacle of a youthful rising star, hardly expected. He made this impression as a student, a thinker and a teacher. He made it not, as the times prompted him to do, by trying to keep the University abreast of the morning newspaper, which is dead the next day, but by trying to raise it toward the philosophical heights of Aristotle and the poetic heights of Homer, whose ideas and words are as fresh now as more than two millenniums ago.

There is one point on which both sides in the present world conflict are agreed. Each may denounce the leadership of the other side, but neither supposes that a change in leadership would make any difference, because both believe that it is a conflict not of persons or governments, but of principles, or of systems of society. The commonly accepted explanation of the conflict, in short, is that the world is now divided between Communism and Capitalism. At the risk of seeming paradoxical it must be asked what this explanation explains, and whether, in fact, it does anything but provide convenient labels for the opposing forces. The implied assumption that states with differing economic systems must necessarily be hostile to one another is at least unproved, and goes against historical experience. It would be easier to explain the conflict as a religious war, and Communism certainly exhibits many of the features of a militant religion, but can we be quite content to dismiss Communists and capitalists as the Protestants and Catholics of the twentieth century? And if we are, can we find many religious wars in which secular and political interests did not provide as strong or stronger a motive than religion?

Friedrich Naumann (1860–1919) was born into that generation of Germans whose Weltanschauung had begun to accommodate an emerging world of science, technology, nationalism, and power politics. When he entered upon university studies in 1879 the Reich had been established, the German industrial revolution was well under way, and the scientific-historical outlook had begun to replace philosophy as the prevailing national temper. These historical currents were presently gathered into his powerful intellect, bent upon understanding itself and the times. This quest mirrored in an extraordinary way the political tendencies and intellectual moods of Wilhelmian Germany. All of its foibles and conceits, its doubts and ambition were freely exhibited in Naumann's writing. A prose style outstanding in modern German letters for its clarity and easy grace facilitated Naumann's task. Few works in German on political subjects share the literary qualities of Naumann's prose; his personal archive of Wilhelmian times can yield pleasure as well as secrets to the historian.

In 1873, an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court filed a memorable dissenting opinion. His brethren had upheld a state-granted monopoly against the charge that it violated the new Fourteenth Amendment. The substance of that majority judgment has never been reversed, and it stands today as one of the great milestones in our constitutional law. But the dissent of Mr. Justice Field, though unproductive as to the specific constitutional doctrine he there espoused, is, from another viewpoint, even more noteworthy. For it marks — or we can conveniently take it as marking — the point in our intellectual history at which the democratic strain in the American tradition begins its subservience to political conservatism.

The choice of a date is indeed somewhat arbitrary. A profound change in the national consciousness does not occur overnight, and the revision of the American ideology diat Field's dissent proclaimed was not yet complete in 1873. But Field was a child of his times, and he spoke with the voice of the new generation. His rambling discourse, with its moral overtones, is evidence that a new era in American political thinking had dawned.

The name of Niccolo Machiavelli (1469–1527), to the public at large, still lies in the shadow of moralistic condemnation. The anti-Machiavellian propaganda of the Counter-Reformation concentrated on the principles of political craftsmanship, developed in the Prince, as its target; and, apart from a narrower circle of historians, Machiavelli has ever since remained the author of the famous work, while the morality of his advice to rulers has remained the great issue of evaluation. It is hardly necessary to say that such preoccupations with moralistic propaganda cannot form the basis for a critical analysis of Machiavelli's ideas. All we can retain from the caricature is the consciousness that something extraordinary has occurred, a severe break with the traditions of treating political questions, the consciousness that with the author of the Prince we are on the threshold of a new, “modern” era. Even this element of the caricature, however, needs qualification. The furious concentration on the evil book has created the illusion that its author was a solitary figure, something like a moral freak. That, of course, is not so. There is nothing solitary or enigmatic about Machiavelli. His ideas, like everybody's, have a solid pre-history stretching over generations; and they were shared in his time by others. Historically unique, however, is the genius of Machiavelli as well as the strange disposition of circumstances directing his genius toward the crystallization of die ideas of die age in the symbol of die Prince who, through fortuna and virtù, will be the savior and restorer of Italy.

When in 1930 Henry Seidel Canby scrutinized the neo-classic philosophy of Harvard professor Irving Babbitt, his article was considered a final examination by the editors of the Saturday Review Literature. They entitled it “Post Mortem.” But Babbitt's views, known as the New Humanism, have been tough enough to outlive than one literary critic's autopsy. Older than his rhetoric, Babbitt's philosophy remains vital today. It is more than a mere obstacle to Ph.D. candidates in English literature or political science. assumes a pressing relevance as Americans toward the middle century seek peace of mind in an armed and inexplicable world nations far from united.

Anyone who lived in France in the years 1945–1946 has a confused impression of both disarray and nostalgia. In the spring of 1946 Father Danielou, S.J., addressing a small group of British teachers, who had come to France at the invitation of the “Catholic Center of French Intellectuals,” described the time aptly: between the past horrors of war and occupation and the ever-present possibility in the immediate future of other horrors still more atrocious, this period seemed to him an oasis. For a great many Frenchmen this time still evokes the disorder due to the occupation, rapid liberation, and also recalls for them the beginning of a convalescence with all the relief and well-being this implies; it is the period of agitation and illusion.

Since the end of World War II British Policy in the Middle East has been plagued by the devils of the past, joined by a more formidable company of contemporary devils, some of whom bear a mocking resemblance to still earlier ones. Most of this region was once largely in the weak hands of the Turkish Empire. In this area, strategic for the control of the Mediterranean and the security of the Suez Canal, British policy had been to support the Turkish Empire against the heavy pressure of Tsarist Russia, until Turkey's association with Germany drove Britain to moderate its rivalry with Russia, to accept her partnership in Persia (1907), following a similar accommodation of differences with France (1904).

During the First World War the British sponsored the Arab Revolt against Turkey, thus shattering the feeble union of those lands, and creating in the Middle East a parody of the Habsburg succession states, complicated by concessions to France (the Sykes-Picot Agreement) and to Zionism (the Balfour Declaration).

The conflict between Stalin's Russia and Tito's Yugoslavia is reminiscent of a quarrel between two old friends whose long intimacy serves only to make their dispute all the more violent and ultimately irreconcilable. Certainly the reaction of the Yugoslavs has followed a familiar pattern: at first, complete incredulity that their old friends and protectors should take a minor dispute centered around a few personalities and a few administrative problems as the opening of a great campaign to proclaim Tito and his collaborators traitors and to call for the destruction of their regime. Then, as the hope of reconciliation vanished (this hope was evident, at least on the Yugoslav side, during the first few months of the dispute), both sides began to recall those moments of strain which at the time of mutual admiration had appeared as only minor dissonances, but now upon reflection, were seen as the first clear signs of the other side's brutality or treachery.

The Partisans fought during the war for their own country but they also fought with a fanatical devotion to the Soviet Union. Apart from the Communist persuasion of their leaders the fact that the Soviet Union was meeting the main fury of German attacks and that it stood as the main defender of the Slavic nations, against Germany's aggression, created an atmosphere in which the slightest criticism of Yugoslavia's great ally would have been inconceivable. Even a few months after July 1948, Tito in his speech to the 5th Congress of the C.P.Y.

Edmund Burke was at once a chief exponent of the Ciceronian doctrine of natural law and a chief opponent of the “rights of man.” In our time, which is experiencing simultaneously a revival of interest in natural-law theory and an enthusiasm for defining “human rights” that is exemplified by the United Nations' lengthy declaration, Burke's view of the natural juridic order deserves close attention.

Unlike Bolingbroke and Hume, whose outward politics in some respects resembled the great Whig statesman's, Burke was a pious man. “The most important questions about the human race Burke answered … from the Church of England's catechism.” He takes for granted a Christian cosmos, in which a just God has established moral principles for man's salvation. God has given man law, and with that law, rights; such, succinctly, is Burke's premise in all moral and juridical questions.

Established societies as well as revolutionary organizations and movements have always developed, though often only obscurely, a vision of an ideal society, generally located in the future although often also in the romantic past. For established communities, the goal sought by the society has had tremendous significance because faith in the desirability of the end envisioned has been one of the chief binding forces. Perhaps of even greater importance has been the dynamic stimulus the belief in an ideal society has given to rising revolutionary movements, such as those which have led to the great upheavals of history. The ultimate and ideal goal is particularly significant during times of crisis, when the loyalties of men are shaken and when frequently the factors most decisive in determining a citizen's position are his acceptance of and confidence in the final aims of the group to which he belongs. As an eminent English dramatist once said, a map of the world which does not include the ideal society has little interest for man, for it is upon the shores of such societies that man is always landing.

A study of a conception of the good society is not only an analysis of a source of cohesion and power; it can also shed great illumination upon an entire system of thought. The examination of a philosophy from this angle, that of the ultimate, ideal aims to be achieved, is particularly revealing in the case of Konstantine Petrovich Pobedonostsev, who was lay administrator of the Russian Orthodox Church from 1880 until October, 1905, and was one of the most prominent statesmen in Russia during the last third of the nineteenth century. During the 1880's in particular, he was as powerful in determining the direction of Russian domestic policy as Bismarck was for three decades in guiding the German state.

“I have so many feelings and ideas in common with the English that for me England has become a second intellectual home.” So wrote de Tocqueville to one of his English friends, when signs of Napoleonic despotism reappeared in the troubled French skies and alarmed liberals began to worry about final issues and coming dangers.

England and its historical pattern of behavior, its “moeurs”, its institutions and above all the peculiar rhythm of its social development, played a most important part in the general formation of de Tocqueville's thought. The Anglo-Saxon world was in his eyes a fairly bright spot in a gloomy and unhappy European picture, a world from which one could occasionally gather some valuable guiding principles as to the understanding of the continental malady and its possible cure.

The first thing one must understand in order to grasp the nature of Bolshevism is its philosophical character. There are, of course, other factors which contributed to the formation and which influence the activity of the Party; but the Party considers itself as acting in the name and for the sake of a philosophical creed. That is why philosophy is considered an overwhelmingly important matter in the contemporary Soviet Union. As this point is often overlooked by Westerners (who are still very much influenced by the positivistic tradition), it is useful and necessary to substantiate it.

During the first years of the American federal republic, Europe was being overrun by French revolutionary forces and ideas. Nation after nation had fallen to the revolutionaries–first weakened by propaganda and subversive organizations, then subdued by soldiery, finally converted into subordinate allies. Watching these successes, some Americans feared that the Atlantic was too narrow to keep revolutionary arms and ideology away. Indeed, the ideology seemed already to permeate the country.

American relations with the successful French nation had become tense and strained shortly after France and Britain went to war in 1793. Many people thought the country had been needlessly endangered by mismanagement of our foreign relations in such a way as to antagonize an otherwise friendly French government. Others thought the United States had been imperilled by too great a toleration of pro-French and revolutionary elements among us, who concealed diabolical designs against American security underneath their very vocal admiration for liberty, equality, and fraternity.

National Bolshevism represents a chapter in German-Russian relations since the First World War. As a policy advocating an Eastern orientation for Germany it is a most puzzling and at this day a very acute phenomenon. To those educated to observe the spectrum of political opinions in terms of Right and Left, with the extreme Right at the opposite end from the extreme Left, National Bolshevism seems a paradox. It suggests the meeting of extremes. More concretely the term stands for a rapprochement between German nationalism and Russian Communism. The story of National Bolshevism is the story of two “strange bedfellows.”

In the effort to comprehend this upsetting pattern it might be recalled that modern psychology has in many ways succeeded in breaking down our traditional thinking about human relations. Love, for example, has lost its meaning apart from hate, which has become its alter ego. We might be tempted to translate this finding into political terms, and National Bolshevism would appear as an example of a political love-hate relationship. It might also be suggested that the further we get from the origins and die more insight we gain into die workings of die two twentieth century extremes — Fascism and Communism — the more we are struck by dieir affinities. We grant diat Fascism is nodiing more dian “doctrineless dynamism,” whereas Communism goes back to die solid doctrinaire structure of Marxism. And even through European history since 1917 often threatened to lead up to an ultimate conflict between Fascism and Communism, die “transmutation” through which Marxism has gone in modern Russia has brought it ironically close to Fascism. It has become increasingly evident that die fight between die two was a mere sham battle.

Aristotle mentions coercion first in his description of the elements of involuntariness: “What sort of acts, then, should be called compulsory? We answer that without qualification actions are so when the cause is in the external circumstances and the agent contributes nothing.” This statement clearly marks the essence of coercion as exteriority, as opposition not only to the higher degree of interiority, of “from-withinness,” which distinguishes voluntary actions, but also to the spontaneity common to all natural processes. Aristotle gives some instances of physical coercion: a man blown from his path by the wind, and a man carried away by kidnappers.

But we know that psychical forces can also bring about coercion. For example, the movements commanded of a person in deep hypnosis have their origin externally to him in the will of the hypnotist; the hypnotized person contributes nothing by way of voluntary decision to those movements. He is an instrument moved by the external, psychical force of the hypnotist's will; that is, he is subject to psychical coercion.

In December 1950, at its annual meeting, the American Historical Association entitled one of its major topics of discussion: “New Views on Metternich.” Its choice of the word “new” certainly recalls, and possibly vindicates, a statement Metternich made well over a century ago: “In 100 years the historian will understand me better.”

New, views either on Metternich, or else on the entire Hapsburg empire, occur in such serious works of research, all published after World War II, as the following (to name just a few): Hannah Straus, Attitude of the Congress of Vienna Toward Nationalism (N. Y., 1949); Robert Kann, The Multinational Empire (N. Y., 1950); Walter Langsam, Francis the Good (N. Y., 1949); Jerome Blum, Noble Landowners and Agriculture in Austria, 1815–1848 (Baltimore, 1948); Golo Mann, Secretary of Europe (New Haven, 1946); Arnold Whitridge, Men in Crisis: The Revolutions of 1848 (N. Y., 1949); several monographs on Austria by R. John Rath in Journal of Modern History and Journal of Central European Affairs; Veit Valentin, The German People (N. Y., 1946).

About twenty-five years ago, the fields and methods of the different academic disciplines concerned with the study of man and his works, and the relations between these disciplines, were a favorite theme of discussion. At that time, the so-called social sciences were experiencing a spectacular expansion in scope simultaneously gaining depth through the constant refinement of their methods. Increasing division of labor in research focused attention on marginal areas, giving rise thereby to several new specialties which threatened to encroach upon already established disciplines. These sometimes heated discussions were, as a whole, a healthy sign of the progress made by the new science of man, which then went through the growing pains of its adolescence. They also meant a staking out of claims between professional groups, a search for new labels and standards, and a reshuffling and re-naming of college courses and text books. This process of reorientation resulted in the organizational structure within which both research and teaching in the American institutions of higher learning have been carried out ever since. Once the demarcation lines had been drawn, however, interest in problems pertaining to the logic of science decreased; and the scholars in the different fields settled down to putting in practice what had now been defined as their proper task.

“Mirabeau and Sieyès are the two strongest minds of the Revolution,” said Talleyrand who knew both of them well. This is no doubt true. It is likewise true that Mirabeau and Sieyes were at opposite poles from each other intellectually. Sieyès was a political theorist; they called him the brain. Mirabeau, on the other hand, was the least theoretical of men. When the Estates General opened he had no draft of a Constitution; Sieyès, on the other hand, had thought of one and even several.

For the whole course of the Revolution until his death in April, 1791, Mirabeau cannot be described by an invariable formula. He cannot be classified in the pro-English school. He wrote to a minister before the Revolution: “the executive life” suited him better than “the speculative life.” Sieyès, and even Mounier, would have been wonderful professors of Constitutional Law. Not Mirabeau. His culture was enormous but disorganized. An omnivorous reader and always with pen in hand, he had made innumerable excerpts from all sorts of books, and drew upon them with no scruples about plagiarism when he wrote his own works. One must be careful to avoid the temptation, to which some have succumbed, of seeing in these plagiarisms the expression of Mirabeau's own ideas.

The turning in the long road which brought Ireland to her independence was found by a hard-minded, persistent leader given to apparent paradoxes who, strange to say, dropped from the vanguard before his country reached her present status as a Republic. Eamon de Valera, soldier, prisoner of three governments, President, insurrectionist, opposition chieftain and Prime Minister, exercised a dominating influence during the determining state of Anglo-Irish relations in this century. Tagged as an extremist, he was rejected die extremists. Saddled with the moderation of authority, he was overthrown by the moderates. Acclaimed as King of Ireland and decried as a trimmer, he held a leadership fraught with superficial inconsistencies.