It is indeed fitting that the centennial year of the death of Cardinal John Henry Newman (1801–1890) should be marked by new attention to the life and writings of this remarkable man of letters who dominated the intellectual and religious life of nineteenth-century England and whose significance as a thinker transcends his time and culture. A brilliant definitive biography by Ian T. Ker is the new polestar without which no future scholarship on Newman will be undertaken, while Ker's satellite works, thematic and focused, translate to the broadest possible readership a Newman never before so fully and realistically portrayed in personality, achievement and genius.

Continuing philosophic doubt concerning the moral foundations of human rights threatens to undermine the growing belief in liberal democracy. This doubt has its roots in the reaction against the Enlightenment and is evident even in John Rawls's retreat from the apparent universalism of his theory of justice. There are good grounds, however, for regarding the traditional Western belief in moral and political autonomy as a sound basis for human rights and liberal democracy.

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.

This article argues, contrary to the analyses of many scholars, that the political thought of the nineteenth-century Swiss cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt is neither frivolous nor irrelevant. More specifically, this essay combines biographical information about Burckhardt with an analysis of his major writings in order to challenge the notion that Burckhardt was simply a cultural historian and not a serious political thinker. The central teaching of Burckhardt's life is that the intellectual in mass society can best serve the community, not by direct political participation, but by working for the intellectual, aesthetic, and moral cultivation of the individual. The central teachings of his political writings are that “great men” often rule but unjustly, that successful leaders approach politics as a “work of art” and master the devices necessary to shape their subjects, that culture should not be subordinated to the state, and finally that individualism, class conflict, mass democracy, and the erosion of culture are both unfortunate and inevitable aspects of modernity.

While recent centenary celebrations held French novelist Georges Bernanos to be a leading Catholic antifascist Resistance thinker, his most original ideas really belong within that history of “French fascism” which has been elucidated in recent studies. His ardent, lifelong admiration for Edouard Drumont (+ 1917), the father of modern anti-Semitism, shaped his new kind of politics. On the very eve of the French defeat of 1940 Bernanos advocated a radical anti-Semitic, anticapitalist, spiritually oriented “national revolution,” not unlike that of the prominent writers who would support Marshall Pétain; his case illustrates why it was so difficult to find genuinely antifascist thinkers among the French Catholic intelligentsia of the period.